


The Beast Was Always There

by Unseemingowl



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Canon compliant levels of violence and gore, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Main characters as children, Missing Scene, Multi, Nick needs more backstory, Nick-centric, Pre-Canon, Witch society is brutal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:48:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 17
Words: 48,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23301160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unseemingowl/pseuds/Unseemingowl
Summary: "I only had the academy. It was my home."New words entered Nicholas Scratch's vocabulary when they pulled him from Amalia's claws in the forest and brought him to the academy - freak, orphan, discipline, ambition, punishment. Words like friend, compassion and loyalty - and love - only came along much later.A chronicle of Nick's relationships with Amalia, Prudence, Sabrina and the devil.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Nicholas Scratch/Sabrina Spellman, Prudence Night/Nicholas Scratch
Comments: 119
Kudos: 64





	1. Blackwood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This started as a simple one shot about Prudence and Nick, but because I can’t leave well enough alone, it snowballed into 17 chapters instead. 
> 
> I wanted to explore the effects the brutality of witch society has had on Nick and his relationship to the sisters and Prudence in particular. Sabrina shows up later on, but ships are not the main focus of this story. It's more of a character study.

The man was nothing like the hunters that had discovered Nick’s bonfire in the forest. Nor the spooked forest patrol officers who had locked Nick in the room after they’d dragged him kicking and screaming to their offices. 

Even if the stranger's nails hadn’t been pointy and his clothes odd, Nick would have known he was different the second he walked through the door and Nick’s nostrils immediately flared. The stranger practically reeked of magic; it clung to his skin and clothes like the flower scents his mother used to dab on her neck and her wrists. 

The stranger didn’t seem in any hurry to talk either, unlike the female officer who had been speaking non-stop while Nick had been with her. Using a soft, gentle voice in an attempt to get him to tell her about why he’d been in the woods. Nick hadn’t replied, merely snarled at her when she’d attempted to put a hand on his shoulder. 

Rather than speak the newcomer shut off the harsh, flickering overhead lights and summoned a warm, yellow glow in his hands – the sight of someone using magic had become so unfamiliar to Nick that he jerked deeper into his corner as the man looked him over. 

“This is a very welcome surprise, young Nicholas. When you disappeared after your parents death we were sure you had died with them.” 

He didn’t speak like the hunters and the officers either. He sounded a little like Nick’s father had done, same crisp way of speaking, but his voice not as resonant, not as deep. When Nick’s father had spoken, his voice had rumbled all way up through his chest. 

“You’re a warlock,” Nick said, the word feeling foreign in his mouth after so long in the woods, where words like prey, and cold and sleep were more important. 

“Nothing gets past you, does it,” the man said with a chuckle that Nick didn’t respond to, but narrowed his eyes at instead. His silence didn’t seem to bother the stranger though, his grin being replaced by a slow, steady smile. “Yes, I’m a warlock. My name is Faustus Blackwood, and I'm the high priest in the Church of Night, do you remember what that is?” 

Nick frowned. The name seemed familiar, but distant too, like so many of the memories of his life before the forest did. But they did come, slowly, memories of his parents dressing up in their best clothes, his fathers silk ties and his mothers shiny pearl earrings, before leaving him in the care of Amalia. When they returned to check on him, smelling strongly of charred herbs and magics, his mother would tell him that he would be able to join them when he was older as she brushed a kiss against his hair. 

“The coven?” Nick ventured, and Faustus Blackwood gave him another slow smile. 

“Good, you haven’t forgotten everything about our ways, so you know that the coven is like a family where we take care of each other.” 

“I can take care of myself,” Nick insisted. 

The high priest chuckled again, the sound coming all the way down from his belly – in this he seemed more like Nick’s father who had always liked to laugh. 

“You’re wilful, that’s good. We like that in a warlock, Nicholas, but you’re a child. You don’t really have a say in the matter. The coven has custody of you now. We’ll raise you, teach you.” 

“What about Amalia?” 

“Ah yes, your unusual familiar-situation. Your Amalia is very welcome to live in the woods around the academy, but we don’t allow familiars at the school.” 

“But Amalia’s family,” Nick protested. 

Blackwood’s lips curled back in a grimace that Nick couldn’t quite figure out what meant. It look like a smile, but didn’t feel like his other ones. 

“That may be, but we don’t allow family to board at the school either. It’s for teachers and students only,” Faustus Blackwood merely said with an indifferent shrug, and Nick wanted to come to Amalia’s defence, mouth opening to protest again, but the high priest held up his hand. 

“Nicholas, there is nothing more to discuss now. You’re coming with me, and we can either do it in a pleasant manner, or I can use magics that I’d rather not.” 

The glow from Faustus Blackwood’s summoned light source changed, threw strange shadows across his face, and Nick could practically feel the air grow denser around him. The smell of magic taking on a sharper, electric scent – it reminded Nick of when a thunderstorm rolled in over the forest. He had no doubt that Faustus Blackwood was capable of making him obey whether Nick wanted to or not. 

“You promise she can come?”

“Naturally, what is a warlock without his familiar?” 

Despite all the officers vows to help Nick and take care of him, they let him leave with Faustus Blackwood without any protests. Nick even saw the high priest take all of the paper work that the female officer with the dimples had filled out, the one who'd tried to touch his shoulder. Judging from the vacant, sluggish way that they all blinked, and the strange pulsing energy coming off of the high priest, Nick assumed he was casting some kind of spell to make them obey, and Nick felt a sharp, nervous clench in his stomach, suddenly happy that he had decided against fighting Faustus Blackwood after all.

But Faustus Blackwood didn't stick around for long. As soon as they'd made their way to the academy where the high vaulted ceilings threw the sounds back at Nick in disorienting fashion, the high priest dropped him off with a red headed witch with a tightly pinched face. She did not look pleased at her new task as she marched him into another high vaulted room where a bath had been prepared for him.

The witch made no effort to hide her disgust at Nick’s lice infested, matted hair and immediately brought out the clippers. So Nick bit her, hard enough to draw blood only to be pinned down by an immobilisation spell in the next instant, her grip biting into his shoulder as she sheared him like a sheep. 

Hands on his skin felt like a violation after so long with nothing but the touch of fur and claw. 

He kicked her afterwards, when she’d scrubbed him raw, soap stinging his eyes and cuts and bruises. 

That was how he’d ended up sequestered, kept apart from the other children until he’d stopped punching and yelling whenever someone pressed him too hard. Until he'd learned to behave without a slap or magical restraints.

His cell was quiet like the cave, but cold, and he missed sleeping curled up next to Amalia’s warm fur. Though judging from the reactions from the adults who did take their time to talk to him – Faustus Blackwood only came by once or twice – that wasn’t an acceptable way to feel. He fought against the urge to feel ashamed of his bond with her as he could feel her prowl the woods outside. 

When they finally did let him out into the dormitories with the other orphans, he’d laid stiff as a board as they’d stared at him, whispered about him. When he felt them drift off one by one he climbed under the bed where it felt more safe, only to wake with a start when someone poked him in the side. 

“Hey freak boy. We have classes and you need to wash your face.” 

He recoiled, scrabbling deeper under the bed as he took in his new opponent. With the way the girl was stooping to look under the bed it would be easy to hit her, and Nick wanted to, but his time in the forest had taught him nothing if not to identify a threat. She might be twig skinny and wear her dark hair in girly plaits, but the way her eyes narrowed in her dark skinned face told him that she would give as good as she got if he tried to strike her. 

“I don’t know where to wash my face,” he muttered, climbing out from under the bed on the opposite side from her. 

She pointed to the chest at the foot of his bed with a sigh. “Towels are in there, and if you hurry, I’ll show you where the bathroom is.” 

Human hygiene still felt strange to him. He had kept with it once of course, he remembered that his mother had been very particular about bath times and teeth brushing, but now the gestures felt meaningless and awkward. Especially with the girl watching him like a hawk. 

“Stop staring at me like I’m some kind of freak,” he protested, mouth full of toothpaste foam that burned on his tongue. 

“You are though,” she said as if it was the most obvious truth in the world. “You’re like some feral boy in a freak show.” 

Nick didn’t know what a freak show was, but he didn’t want to say as much – the girl already looked at him like he was a dumb deer who’d blundered its way into a wolf’s den – but he didn’t have to say anything, she seemed to know what he was thinking. 

“A freak show was a place where mortals used to put people like you in cages and made you dance next to the bearded ladies and conjoined twins,” she explained, stumbling a little across the word conjoined that Nick didn’t know the meaning of either, but the way she said it, there was no way it was a good thing. “You’re lucky you’re a warlock, we don’t mind freaks.” 

“You’re a bitch,” he snapped, reaching for the nastiest word he had known before Amalia had taken him into the woods. The girl simply smiled. 

It wasn’t a nice smile. 

“And you need to grow thicker skin if you want to make it here. We’re not cut out for pity, so don’t try to fish for it. No good ever comes of that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had planned to write this as a full long-form oneshot, but after passing twenty word-pages in my drafts, I figured that might be a bit too much after all. So instead I'll write it as a bunch of shorter chapters, right now I estimate it to be about 10, but might be more. 
> 
> As always, you're more than welcome to come over to my [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unseemingowl). and say hi too.


	2. Scratches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I realise that I've been kind of outpaced by the Sarah Rees Brennan's Path of Night in terms of giving Nick a backstory, but who cares! It's called transformative works for a reason. 
> 
> I still have so many feelings about Nick and Prudence as characters to write a lot more.

There were so many new words at the Academy of Unseen Arts. Not just exciting ones like psychopomp, demonology and transmutation, but old words were made new again too. Words Nick thought he knew already, but at the academy meant something else entirely. Words like control and punishment. Like freak and orphan. 

Nick preferred the new exciting words that were best found in the library. The stacks were incidentally also the only place in the whole academy where there was any proper quiet to be found amidst all the noise and the too many bodies crowded together. 

When he sheltered and hid in the nooks and crannies of the library, it felt almost like the caves of the woods. 

Yet no matter which distant hole Nick had cuddled up with a pile of books, Cassius, the academy’s ancient, bespectacled librarian, would always find him before he locked up for the night. Urging him out from under tables and hidden alcoves and steering Nick's sleepy and groggy self to his bed in the dormitories for the uninitiated children with a gentle hand. 

There weren’t many of them at the beginning. The unbaptised. Just five in all, orphans the lot of them. Nick and Alistair. Prudence, Agatha and Dorcas. All of them left to the governance of the teachers at the academy, with Father Blackwood to make sure they grew up knowing the magics and the might of the Dark Lord. 

But even Satan was different at the academy. 

Although the great hall’s statue of the Dark Lord looked just like the effigies that he remembered from his old home – the same curve to the wings and curl to the beard – Satan in Father Blackwood’s sermons was very different to the Lucifer that Nick recalled from his parents teachings. 

When he would kneel at the foot of the Dark Lord with them, prostrate themselves as his mother had called it, she would tell him of the glory that Lucifer Morningstar bestowed upon them when they signed their name in the Book of the Beast. How loving him was more important than anything else in the world. Because the reward for loving him was power. Power to walk the earth always feeling the sun from both sides. 

And so Nick loved the Dark Lord. For waking his magics early, for giving him his father’s laughter and his mother’s embrace. And when they died he thanked him for having Amalia. Even when he was cold and hungry and pinned to the ground by her claws when he was disobedient, he thanked the Dark Lord for her protection. 

When Faustus Blackwood talked of their Lord, he spoke of the power too, but in his sermons Lucifer was almost always wrathful in his love for his witches, jealous in his affection for his chosen flock. Do what thou wilt, but the Dark Lord is your master in all things. 

Although as Nick slowly realised, the do what thou wilt part was easier for him than it was for the others. 

Well, than it was for Prudence, Agatha and Dorcas at least. Who ever really knew about Alistair? 

Nick might have been dubbed the resident freak boy at the academy by every student there courtesy of Prudence, but Alistair was far weirder, always staring at everyone with those watery, grey eyes of his and none of the reprimands or punishments ever seemed to stick in the way they did with the rest of them. 

When Nick was caught stealing from the kitchens, he got away with a slap across the face, but after Agatha had done the same, there was no food for her at all in following twenty-four hours. Nick got another slap when he tried sneaking her a stale bread roll from the lunch table – he remembered the gnawing of hunger from the woods when Amalia hadn’t been able to find them any food. 

And in black Sunday school a correct answer earned Nick a smile from Father Blackwood or sometimes a pat on the shoulder, whereas Prudence just got a nod in acknowledgement. Even though Prudence knew the satanic scriptures far better than Nick did. 

He wasn’t sure why Blackwood disregarded Prudence so, but when he started to read the many witch history books that Cassius provided him with, he thought he might have discovered the answer. 

Although neither of them had parents, not every orphan was the same at the academy. Nick still had a family. Or at least a family name. 

The Scratch name was all over the witch annals. Hundreds of years of them. From when his ancestors had lived as dirt-poor peasants in the moors and mountains of the old country to their rise in power and might in New England. 

There had been three high priests with the name of Scratch in the Church of Night. Even the Blackwood family had only had two, including Faustus Blackwood. Only the Spellman family had produced more high priests. Five of them. 

History said little, if anything of the many Nights of their coven. 

Perhaps that was why he was always Mr. Scratch to the teachers while Prudence, Agatha and Dorcas were always just that. Prudence. Agatha and Dorcas. No last name needed. 

Prudence's face never seemed to give anything away in class, so it wasn’t until Nick one day caught sight of Prudence's fingers clenching under her desk that he realised just how much it bothered her to be overlooked by Blackwood. 

When Prudence caught him looking, spine stiffening and fists uncurling as if through great effort, he realised that he’d found a place where he could sink a barb that might actually hurt her. 

He didn't have to wait very long before he got a chance to see just how right he was. The next time she called him freak boy, Agatha and Dorcas laughing alongside her, Nick struck without thinking. 

“I’d rather be a freak than gutter orphans like you.” 

All three of them froze. Their faces looked all wrong as they for once had none of the sharply pointed taunts that so often had Nick struggle against the old urge to snarl and scratch, all the bad habits that had earned him the title of freak boy in the first place. 

“It’s a good thing you’ll always be a freak then,” Prudence finally snapped, but her hands were clenched again. 

When Nick saw Agatha and Dorcas looking to Prudence with an uncertain flicker in their gaze, he realised the triumph tasted a lot bitterer than he’d thought. 

Especially when they stopped talking to him for the next two weeks, and Nick began avoiding the dormitories again, staying in the library as long as possible as he chased down the members of his kin. 

Knowing how long his family line stretched was a strange sort of knowledge. To Nick his family had always been small, just his mother and father and Amalia. To realise that he had distant cousins in Ireland and the Balkans was not as comforting as he thought it would be. None of them were called Scratch. Nick was the last one. 

“I got you something.” 

Startled he looked up from the chicken scrawl in the records he’d been staring at for hours. Eyes squinting to adjust to the extra light. Prudence’s hand was extended towards him, fingers wrapped tight around a book. It was nothing like the heavy leather bound tomes around them, the glossy front cover obviously marking it as a mortal book. 

“What is this?” 

“Just take it,” Prudence snapped, and Nick obeyed with a roll of his eyes. 

When Nick didn’t say anything else, Prudence slowly moved closer, hovering by the edge of his desk. He could sense the hesitation rolling off of her in waves. 

“Where did you get this?” He questioned, frowning at the curious black and white photo on the front cover. Dark eyes peering out from a face entirely covered in long well-combed hair. 

“In the bookshop in Greendale. It’s about freak show performers.” When Nick looked up, brows lifted high and feeling a smile tug on his lips despite himself, Prudence continued, pointing to the portrait of the hair covered man. “That guy was pretty cool, He was an acrobat and spoke five languages.” 

“Thank you,” Nick said, trying to remember the last time he had received a gift. The memory of his last birthday was hazy. There had been cake, his mother playing the piano, his father singing. 

“It’s not just about the name, you know,” Prudence said after a few moments of Nick turning the book over and over in his hands, unsure of what to say. 

“What?” 

“Blackwood doesn’t like witches being too assertive. Doesn’t think it’s their job to outshine the warlocks,” she muttered. “At least that’s what I heard sister Jackson telling her sister a few weeks back.” 

“That’s stupid.” 

Prudence’s lashes fluttered in surprise, obviously not expecting him to disagree with Blackwood so vehemently, and he felt a lurch of guilt for their last confrontation. 

“You don’t think girls can be too bossy?” 

“Didn’t say that,” Nick laughed, but when Prudence’s eyes narrowed he hastened to add. “I like the competition. Makes classes more fun, and it’s not like taking Alistair on is going to be a challenge. He’s too busy talking to his imaginary friends.” 

“Not sure they’re imaginary,” Prudence remarked, although not sounding too sure about it. But then again, who ever really knew about Alistair.

“Must be boring spirits or demons then. Can’t imagine Alistair has that much interesting stuff to say.” 

Prudence giggled, and as it died out, quiet settled between them again. A distant hum of voices and the occasional thump of books the only reminder that they weren’t alone. 

Nick looked away from Prudence and back to the records he’d pulled out earlier in the evening. 

“My mom was the one who taught me. My dad would always get his convexes and concaves mixed up,” he said, picking at the faded paper. 

His father had never acted as if his mother took up too much space. On the odd occasion his mother weren’t the one teaching, she would usually wander in at some point and find some date or formula to add something extra to. His father had never seemed angry to be interrupted. As far as Nick remembered, he had always laughed and kissed her when he’d forfeited the blackboard to her. 

“Your mother was a scholar?” 

“They both were, but my mother was a lot more practical about it. She was the one who invited people over to talk about stuff. Other scholars and professors,” Nick said, remembering the many people who had come in and out of their home, the long tobacco and brandy soaked conversations in the library, Nick listening into talks of ancient nesite or the politics of the church. Most of it incomprehensible, but it sounded like a part of that glowing future his mother always talked about. 

“What was her name? We could see if some of the stuff she published is here," Prudence asked, suddenly sounding more interested in the subject of Nick's mother than anything else they'd been taught over the last couple of weeks. 

With another twist in his guts, he recalled what he’d discovered in the records earlier in the evening. He wondered if his mother had been just as much of an over-achiever as Prudence was now. He sighed and pushed the records towards Prudence, pointing out the name he'd been tracing his fingers across over and over again. 

“She’s right there.” 

Prudence’s eyes widened when she looked back up at Nick, who grimaced with a fresh wave of guilt. 

“She was a Night.” 

“Yeah,” Nick admitted with a mirthless chuckle. “I’m part gutter orphan too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figured that Nick's mom had to have left a big impression on his childhood since Nick was able to withstand all the warlocks-are-better propaganda at Blackwood's academy. Do you agree? I'd love to hear your thoughts. 
> 
> As always, you're also more than welcome to come over to my [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unseemingowl) and say hi as well.


	3. Familiar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was quite a bit delayed again, because honestly with all the awful images from across the pond in the news, I couldn't really figure out how to get back into the edit-headspace. I hope you're all being safe over there. 
> 
> Although it is in the tags, it bears reminding that this story does include abuse and cruelty to children. Nick will be about 12 or 13 in this chapter.

_You’re getting weak in that stone house._

Nick rolled his eyes as he staggered the last few steps into the middle of the clearing where the great wolf waited for him to catch up, breathing too hard to sass her back.

As his familiar watched him with her wild, yellow eyes, Nick dropped onto his back in the tall, sweet smelling grass. Amalia didn’t leave him be for long, breath heavy on his face as she pushed her whiskered muzzle against his temple, and Nick grimaced as the smell of blood and a fresh kill filled his nose.

”I’m not a hunter that needs to chase down prey anymore,” Nick protested and tried to push her out of the way, only to be tackled back to the ground by Amalia, the air leaving his lungs in a heave.

Rather than try to engage in her rough and tumble test of strength, as his younger self would have, Nick reached up to tug on her shaggy neck fur, his old signal for tapping out of the struggle. That he would submit. That he was beat.

_If you’re not a hunter, you’re prey_ , she grumbled, backing off of him, slowly, as if reluctant to accept his surrender.

Nick followed her up, hiding his face in her fur and doing his best not to show that he could sense how agitated she was. Her low, uneasy growl vibrated against his cheek, only gradually settling as Nick breathed with her in an attempt to make her calmer.

They were far away from the academy, he wasn’t even sure he recognised the clearing that Amalia had brought him to. No sound around them except birds and the wind rushing through the trees.

That was happening more now – Amalia leading him further and further away each time he came to see her – always watching him when it was time for him to go back to the academy. As though she was waiting to see if this was the time that she had brought him far enough that he would forget about it and stay with her.

She still hadn't managed that, and Nick didn't think she ever would. He was sure that he would never be able to shake the hold the academy had over him now. The magics pouring from that place was like a beacon in his mind, despite the teachers' scorn and Father Blackwood's dour sermons, calling him back to the smell of books and incense - the sound of the sisters’ mocking giggles. 

Amalia felt that pull in him, could feel her own bonds with him being contested, no matter how many rivers or rocks or trees that she tried to put between him and Gehenna Station.

Nick could feel it in the way she stared at him despite how hard he tried to soothe her. Otherwise she wouldn’t run him ragged through the woods to try and rebuild his strength until he was more like old, feral self.

And otherwise she wouldn’t have broken into the academy.

Nick still hadn’t managed to figure out how she had snuck inside past the fortifications of the academy, but he had sensed her immediately.

As the thrum of her presence entered his dreams, he had jolted awake, nearly sending him sprawling over the edge of his bed. Yet despite that forewarning, the sight of her looming in the dark hallway, yellow eyes glaring at the door to the girls’ dormitory, had been so bizarre that for a few moments he was sure he was sleepwalking.

She had made no attempts to conceal how little she appreciated the changes in him, made more obvious by seeing him amidst the pomp of the academy instead of under the naked sky. Burying her face against his neck like she used to, she’d growled at the smell of other people clouding his scent.

Nick wasn’t sure what she could smell on him, but he could guess – the starch from the sisters’ collars, smoke from Cassius’ pipe, perhaps even the fetid odour of Alistair’s collection of cold-water creatures.

_You smell strange_ , Amalia persisted now, stirring enough that Nick had to let go of her and let her stalk the clearing. _It hurts my nose._

“Stop it,” Nick grumbled, throwing a few twigs at her, Amalia crushing them between her teeth with a mocking chuckle. “I don’t smell any stranger than I used to when we lived with mother and father.”

_You do. Of silly, little girls and desperation_ , Amalia growled, playfulness forgotten in favour of a strong note of contempt in her voice.

“They’re not silly,” Nick objected, thinking of the brightness in Prudence’s eyes as she’d helped him track down the few manuscripts at the academy that carried his mother’s signature – her eagerness as she’d flicked through the pages alongside him.

“Look, one of them helped me find some of mother’s work.”

He reached into his backpack, pulling out the paper, brandishing the yellowed pages in Amalia’s direction. Lillias Scratch had been Amalia’s kin too, but not even that could make his familiar interested in books – a creature of blood and the woods, not of paper and spells. She seemed to forget her scorn for a moment though, possessively curling around him, head settling warm and heavy on his thigh. 

There hadn’t been many of his mother’s articles kept in the library. In fact, to Nick’s disappointment, it didn’t seem as though she’d had many things published at all. As Cassius informed him, few female scholars published as lead writers, and when they did, it was not very often. Prudence had looked just as stricken by the information as Nick felt. Though Nick knew it was for entirely different reasons than him.

He had hoped he might find his mother’s voice in her writing, but the academic language of Lillias Scratch sounded nothing like the mother he remembered, elegant and melodic. It was dense, theoretical texts - centered chiefly on the bond between witches and their familiars - and hard to struggle through. His father was more prolific as a writer, but if possible, his prose was even drier, focused on languages so ancient that they were barely used for any spells at all anymore.

“We found this one yesterday, it’s a paper by the former high priest, Father Spellman, that she contributed to,” Nick told Amalia, who merely sneezed at the smell of dust and incense when he flicked open the pages.

After finding the paper, he had walked up to the portrait gallery of the academy’s former headmasters to stare at Edward Spellman’s bearded face and struggled to remember if he had ever seen the former high priest in their house.

So far he had come up short, but Nick’s memories of his early years were growing dimmer with every day. Time blotted out the details – more and more he was left with only the broadest contours of his old life. His mother's perfume, the width of his father's shoulders, sleeping curled up against the rumble of Amalia's breath.

“Do you remember if an Edward Spellman ever came to our house?”

_I didn’t care for any of their paper smelling friends. I’m surprised you’re interested. All they ever were trample all over the house with their foul-smelling spells and steal all of your parents’ attention._

“They didn’t steal all of their attention, mother and father were still around.”

He could see them now as he spoke. His father putting odds and ends from his travels into Nick’s hands, singing songs to him in words that Nick couldn’t understand. His mother pulling him away from his rough housing with Amalia to comb his hair and put him in front of the important people in the house, urging him to show their guests the spells he’d managed, face glowing with pride under the shine of the lights that Nick conjured over their heads.

_Were they? Then why was I the one to take care of you when your father ran off to yet another one of his excavations or your mother was busy playing the dutiful daughter of night to the church?_

He remembered reaching for his mother’s crisp silk skirts, and finding he couldn't get a proper grip on them. His father’s impatient sigh, his mother’s brushing a fleeting kiss against the crown of his hair before they both disappeared out of the door, leaving him to Amalia’s care – Nick never quite important enough to keep them with him when he wanted them to.

“They taught me how to be a witch,” Nick insisted through the treacherous squirm of doubt in his belly, only for Amalia to tackle him back down into the grass, her paws a heavy weight on his chest, claws breaking through his shirt and the skin below

_Their paper sorcery didn’t save them. Won’t save you either. I did, remember? Where would you have been for my strength and my love?_

”Dead,” Nick admitted, voice harsh under the strain of Amalia’s body pressing down on him. He reached up to tug on her neck fur again; punctuating the gesture with a muttered, “You saved me. I know that.”

She didn’t move off of him at first, her sudden spike of anger fading only gradually. Nick stared up at her, refusing to follow the urge to struggle and give her cause for another fit of anger. When she finally did let up with a press of her cold nose to his cheek, Nick rolled away, chest filling with an old, guilt tinged rage as breath rushed back into his lungs.

He wondered how far he could get now before she would catch up. He had been strong before the hunters had found him, legs and lungs tough from use, but even then he had been no match at all for her force, never managing to get far.

A low whine reached his ears, the sound rare and pitiful, and Nick flinched, looking into the glow of Amalia’s wild, yellow eyes. He was sure she had some kind of idea of the churn of his thoughts. Had to – it felt as though it was all just spilling out of him.

Nick launched himself at her, burying his fingers in her fur to pin down the powerful bulk of her shoulders, and she snarled, but then, to his surprise, surrendered, letting him do it.

_You’re changing_ , she said, and for the first time that day, she sounded sad, not angry.

”You mustn’t worry about me,” Nick said, letting go of her fur with one hand to stroke over her restlessly twitching ears. ”I’ll be the strongest warlock anyone’s ever seen.”

As Amalia’s restless growl filled the clearing once more, Nick’s gaze skittered back to the abandoned manuscript, the other papers spilling out of the backpack.

He might not have found what he was looking for in them, but perhaps his mother’s writing on familiars held something else, something he needed far more now. A way to temper Amalia's rage, her strength humming like a spring waiting to be released under his hands. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nick's not quite aware of how toxic his relationship with Amalia is yet, which is why I've tried to make him a bit more ambivalent about the whole thing. Things will get worse for them though. 
> 
> As always, you're also more than welcome to come over to my [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unseemingowl) and say hi as well.


	4. Initiate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish had a good excuse for this taking so long to go up, but I don't. I had way too many elements that I wanted to cram into this, and had to cut big chunks of texts. Still ended up with about 3500 words though. Not quite sure how that happened.

It started with the pinkies, delicately linking each of them together as they strode through the hallways of the academy.

Dorcas walked taller with her little finger intertwined with her sister’s and Agatha’s shoulders relaxed from their brittle posture – the two of them flanking a fire eyed Prudence, who served as the figure head.

It was a strange picture that they made, taking up too much space, their steps faltering, not quite in time, but those who dared to laugh soon grew to regret it. Even amongst the upperclassmen who had already signed their name in the book of the beast and received the Dark Lord’s blessing.

Because Prudence and her sisters had never needed magic to wreak havoc. Nick knew that better than most, had assisted them in enough of their mischief to know just how inventive their plots could be.

They had always been in tune with one another in that way, but Nick had always chalked that up to the three of them growing up in the Academy together from infancy. He and Alistair hadn’t joined their little motley orphan crew before they all were around ten.

Nick should have known that it ran deeper than that. Felt rather stupid that he hadn’t. After all, the ideas and tempers of the girls matched so well, Agatha and Dorcas instinctively seeming to know and relish whatever direction Prudence wanted them to go - it made sense that their magics matched as well, and that they grew stronger as they learned to march in pace with each other as their dark baptism loomed ever closer.

Their attention to him started to come in sporadic, rapid-fire bursts, usually after one of their excursions when they would return flushed and excited from what was obviously attempts to test the limits of their pre-baptismal powers. They reeked of magics, not that he bothered asking them questions for long.

The only answers he got was their shared laughs and glances that spoke a language that Nick wasn’t privy to. Wasn't welcome to try and understand either

“You need better clothes, Nicky.”

He groaned at the sound of Dorcas’ voice, reluctant to look up when she slid onto the desk next to him.

“I’m busy, Dorcas, with studying, not with my sartorial choices.”

“Evidently,” she retorted, adding an impatient eye roll that she seemed to have grown very fond of since she’d gotten her stutter under control.

“Alright,” Nick sighed, leaning back into his chair with a look down his body. He wore a very respectable witch-black sweater and jeans, nothing wrong with it to his mind. “I’ll bite. What’s wrong with the way I dress.”

“Well, for one, your clothes fit you all wrong,” Agatha said, coming up behind him and pulled at his sweater sleeves. “The seams should be hitting your shoulders, not your elbows.”

“Alistair wears baggy stuff too,” Nick said defensively.

Prudence’s laughter came from somewhere off to his side, appearing on the other end of the table, sly grin on her face.

“You can’t seriously be thinking of Alistair’s style as one to emulate,” she chuckled as she looked in the direction of Alistair a few desks further down.

Alistair had only gotten weirder since he’d stepped into the woods to take his baptism as the first among them a few weeks prior and had now taken to wearing what looked suspiciously like a cape. Nick grimaced.

“You’ve got quite nice shoulders under here Nicky,” Agatha said, once again putting her hands on him, more focused this time, cupping her hand round his arms and Nick felt a confused urge to squirm away and lean into it as the same time.

He was flushed when she removed her hands and shifted in his chair so that he could look at her. Agatha’s head was cocked, eyes unreadable as she stared at him.

“Come on,” Dorcas said, yanking him up from the chair like a cork from a bottle, Prudence and Agatha falling into step with them as she dragged him off.

They didn’t pay attention for long. Once they’d had their fun, they disappeared of into their private, little world again and left Nick in clothes that were way tighter than he could wear without feeling awkward.

And so Nick took refuge in his own little world too. In the library with Edward Spellman as his favourite companion.

The former high priest’s writing was unlike any of the other scholars that Nick had read at the academy, his prose so beautifully concise it felt as though Nick could feel him sit next to him as he read. And the clear distinctive voice Nick had been searching for in vain in his parents’ papers was present in Edward Spellman’s in spades. He was able to make sense of things for Nick in ways that Father Blackwood still hadn’t managed through years of sermons.

Nick was desperate to get his hands on just one of the many volumes of Edward Spellman texts that he knew was kept in the sanctum, but Cassius showed no leniency. He had allowed Nick a peek at books meant for more advanced students once or twice, but hardly anyone was allowed near the more controversial theories of the former high priest.

Certainly not witches and warlocks who weren’t baptized yet.

Nick had to make do with the former high priest’s early writings. Before he’d gone off on the deep end and still stuck to writing about conjuring circles and variations on the baptismal ritual around the world.

“I should have known it would be you hogging the Spellman works.”

Nick looked up, startled, not used to being interrupted by anyone other than the sisters or Cassius. He recognized the guy standing in front his desk though. Tristan Flyte was a hard guy to not notice with his startlingly blue eyes and tall frame.

“Sorry, Tristan” Nick said, swallowing anxiously at the older boy’s proximity, and gestured to the books. “What are you looking for?”

“Introductions to conjuration,” he said, stepping closer, and Nick fished out the volume from the pile of books he’d amassed.

Only Tristan didn’t move away, eyes curious as he looked Nick over, brows pulling together in frown as if Nick was a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out.

“You look different, Scratch.”

“Oh right,” Nick chuckled, picking at his new, soft cashmere sweater. “The sisters took me shopping.”

“Suits you, shoulders look nice,” he said with a wink, before heading off back to his own desk and leaving Nick to blush in peace.

Tristan Flyte was the only other student at the academy who seemed to spend as much time in the library as Nick did, and automatically that meant they ran into each other, but he had never flirted with Nick before. The feeling was unfamiliar, leaving Nick with a feeling like pins and needles all over his body as he stared after Tristan.

Neither of Tristan’s parents were particularly skilled warlocks – he’d revealed as much when Nick had gathered the courage to talk to him – and Tristan was determined to outdo both of them. Hence all the reading and hence why he was grudgingly willing to listen to Nick’s recommendations in a way that none of the other older students were. Despite the fact that Nick had probably read most of the library by now.

He didn’t roll his eyes when Nick started to go off on one of his impassioned rants about Spellman’s writing either. Besides Cassius, Alistair was the only other one who didn’t roll his eyes when Nick did that, but then again, he was pretty sure that Alistair didn’t actually listen to him when he did. Tristan at least seemed like he paid attention.

Two evenings later he was back as the library had started to empty out, settling his books down at the same desk as Nick was sitting at, brows raised as though he was daring him to object. Nick was too distracted by the way the light struck his impossibly long eyelashes to say anything much. Thoughts he knew he wasn’t supposed to indulge in bubbling to the forefront of his mind.

The older students weren’t supposed to interfere with the younger students in the same way that the unbaptized were supposed to keep themselves pure for the Dark Lord, but sex was everywhere at the academy and a lot of the older students got a kick out of teasing them. Dorcas especially had been the target for that kind of interactions before she had gotten her stutter under control.

Tristan hadn’t seemed to be one of the people who made a sport out of teasing Nick and the other younger students, but the way he looked at Nick with a slow, wicked grin when he caught him staring at his mouth definitely did seem like some sort of provocation.

Nick was kind of embarrassed at how obvious he was being about the whole thing, but Tristan had the prettiest mouth that Nick had ever seen, plush and soft looking, his cupid’s bow delicate as girl’s. And just watching him chew on a pencil had Nick’s pants growing tighter. 

So Nick stared and stared and followed Tristan when he took excursions into the stacks to look for books, badgering him for his choices in a way that made Tristan chuckle.

“Not Cecil Hawthorne, Tristan, he's boring as a brick” Nick would gripe, or “Demarcy is really much better than Holbein, he likes puns.”

“Fuck’s sake Nick, have you read the entire library or what?” Tristan grumbled, and then sent Nick up the ladder to find the books he was pointing him to.

“Not yet, but getting pretty close,” Nick laughed, “You should add Sørensen, he’s got some pretty cool perspectives on the Danish witch trials.”

“You’re a bossy, little bastard,” Tristan muttered as Nick turned back with the book, still half hanging onto the ladder, and all of a sudden Tristan was touching him.

His hand thrust up under his sweater, and Nick froze in shock, feeling pinned like a butterfly in his awkward perch on the ladder. As the heat of Tristan’s fingers soaked into his shivering abdomen, Tristan used his free hand to tangle in his sweater and pull.

Nick staggered right down into Tristan’s waiting arms and ready mouth, but he landed all wrong. Lips mashing and teeth clacking together. Tristan didn’t seem deterred though, his laughter becoming more like a wicked chuckle, a sound that sent a hot shiver down Nick’s spine.

None of that was supposed to happen, the pleasures of the flesh were to be sworn to the Dark Lord, but Nick somehow followed along anyhow, breathing hard in anticipation as Tristan boxed him in.

“How about you let me run the show?” Tristan muttered against his mouth, and without waiting for a response, he crowded Nick up against the shelves, strong hands immobilising his head in a thrillingly authoritative manner as he kissed him.

The rush of blood in his ears made Nick feel lightheaded and dizzy, and he only seemed to register what was happening in hot, disjointed flashes when Tristan stopped kissing his mouth and his lips travelled down his neck, fingers tiptoeing even lower.

It felt so good to be touched, Nick couldn’t remember the last time he had been touched this much – Tristan’s hands all over him, under his shirt, against his bare skin, and Nick was scrabbling to get his hands on as much of Tristan as possible too. At least he was until Tristan yanked open Nick’s pants. Nick seemed to lose all coordination in his limbs after that.

“Your eyes are pretty when you come,” Tristan said afterwards as he wiped his hand.

Nick could feel himself flush all over, chest feeling hot and achy all of a sudden and he ducked his head to avoid Tristan’s eyes to reach out and tug his jeans open instead. Tristan was pretty when he came too, teeth digging into his plush lower lip, shoulders tensing as he reached in to cup Nick’s jaw and pull him in for a kiss.

“We probably shouldn’t tell anyone about this,” he breathed against Nick’s mouth as he did up his buttons and Nick winced as the enormity of what they’d done dawned on him, and yet when Tristan kissed him again, low and hot and mostly laughing, Nick still wanted more.

As far as he knew they had been alone in the library, but someone had spotted what they had been doing.

At least that was what Nick surmised when he was called to Blackwood’s office and caught sight of Tristan’s red face and guilty flinch as he retreated from that very same office.

“I imagine you know why you are here, Mr. Scratch?” the headmaster said, as he closed the door behind him.

For a second he considered saying nothing, simply settling in with a sullen silence, but Nick steeled his spine against the disapproval on Father Blackwood’s face. He refused to feel ashamed of what he’d done, as ill-advised as it had been. He needed to act like it.

“I think so, Father Blackwood,” Nick said, fighting to keep his voice as steady as possible as he sunk into the chair opposite the headmaster’s desk.

Father Blackwood’s long, pointed nails tapped against the desk as he looked Nick over, and Nick did his best to seem unaffected as he looked over the items on the desk, focusing his attention on the teal, polygonal sphere balancing close to Father Blackwood’s right hand.

“We do have the highest understanding for our young witches and warlocks’ more… rambunctious urges, but you’re fifteen. Still unbaptised. You should know the rules, yes?”

“Yes, Father Blackwood.”

“Remind yourself then,” Blackwood didn’t raise his voice, but he didn’t need to, the threat and censure a dark current under the crisp diction.

“Our bodies and souls must remain pure and untouched until the Dark Lord puts his mark on us and we are reborn in Satan’s image,” Nick said, the tenet slipping easily off his tongue.

“And have you been keeping to that rule, Mr. Scratch?”

“No, Father Blackwood,” he admitted, forcing himself to look straight into Blackwood’s eyes, meeting the high priest’s disapproval head on.

“And what do you suppose that we should do about that, young Scratch?”

“I expect that I will be getting some kind of punishment.”

“Punishment is most certainly in order, but I understand from my conversation of Mr. Flyte that no penetration took place,” Blackwood began, Nick could feel his face get caught in a flinch as he realised how many details Tristan had provided the headmaster with.

He wondered if Tristan had been the one to offer them up, or if Blackwood had forced them out of him. Nick wasn’t sure what would feel worse.

“That’s good,” Blackwood continued, oblivious, or perhaps just indifferent to any discomfort Nick’s was feeling. “Works in your favour in terms of your dark baptism.”

“I would have been denied my baptism otherwise?”

“It’s a possibility. Although of course, penetration is the thrust of the matter with girls in a way it isn’t for boys, as I’m sure you know.”

“Yes, Father Blackwood,” Nick said, trying to rein in his distaste at the headmaster’s dark amusement.

“Now, you will be in detention until your dark baptism two months from now. You will report to Brother Lovecraft each day after classes end. If you can’t figure out how to show a bit of restraint, by yourself, we’ll simply have to keep you preoccupied until you can give into temptation.”

“Yes, Father Blackwood,” Nick said through numb lips and stumbled from the room when the headmaster dismissed him.

As far as Nick knew neither he nor Tristan spoke of the incident, but the rumour still spread like hellfire through the school. Nick could feel it in the way that everyone stared at him, not exactly relishing in their surprise that the nerdy orphan boy had somehow been the first one in a while to get caught fiddling around with someone before their dark baptism.

Worse than all the unwanted scrutiny from the students and Brother Lovecraft’s never-ending lectures were the fact that Tristan wouldn’t talk to him, practically running in the opposite direction whenever Nick tried to engage him. But then again, Tristan had never made any excuse of the fact that being the best warlock he could be had been his prime ambition, being seen around school with his indiscretion wouldn't be productive to that. Didn't change the fact that the betrayal still smarted. 

“This is starting to get embarrassing to watch,” Prudence said, plopping down next to him and interrupting Nick in the middle of yet another pining stare across the dining hall where Tristan was sitting with a bunch of the other warlocks from his year.

He caught sight of Luke Chalfant cosying up to Tristan with a smile.

“Fuck off, Prudence,” he snapped, but Prudence wasn’t so easily deterred by his bluntness, and just laughed.

“I mean, he was reckless enough to put the moves on a baby warlock and then folded like wet paper when he was caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Boy is gutless.”

“I guess, I’m just too big a temptation to resist,” Nick said, matching her viciousness with sarcasm, which only succeeded in making her smirk.

“It’s our makeover,” Dorcas said as she joined them, and Nick sighed, looking around for Agatha who was a few steps away, heading in their direction. Obviously they had decided to take an interest again now that he’d done something scandalous. “We made you too cute.”

“I’m cute huh?” He said, aiming for somewhere flirtatious or at least casual, but sounding way too aggressive to his own ears - Dorcas looked delighted at the attempt though, while Prudence rolled her eyes as she broke apart her bread roll

“Sure, you’re cute,” Agatha interjected, settling down next to him. “Like an overexcitable puppy is cute.”

”I’m not overexcitable,” Nick protested.

”Right, that’s why you _didn’t_ play handsies with Tristan Flyte.”

“Fuck you too, Agatha.”

“Sweet Satan, you’re no fun being around when you’re like this. So prickly," Agatha sighed, looking very much like he had just spoiled her fun. "You should consider yourself lucky. Lydia got caught with Armaros in the green house last night. She’ll be doing penitence for a month before she’s allowed to ask the Dark Lord if he still wants her.”

The hypocrisy wasn’t lost on Nick. There might not have been any penetration taking place, but Nick felt decidedly less virginal after having had Tristan’s hands on him.

“It wasn’t you guys who told on us, was it?”

“Excuse me,” Prudence said, looking offended enough to hex him, but Nick didn’t back down, staring right back at her until she let out a contemptuous sigh.

“We have better things to do that worry about your tawdry little love affair, Nicky.”

“I’m not in love with him,” Nick snapped.

“Good. Because that would just be pathetic,” Prudence sing-songed, Agatha and Dorcas echoing her ‘pathetic’ in a way that was new and entirely too eerie.

“No one needs a disloyal lover,” Prudence continued, as if having her own little choir was normal.

“What would you know about that?” Nick scoffed, not willing to believe that they would ever do anything to jeopardise their status as perfect satanic virgins.

“Oh Nicky,” Agatha laughed next to him, reaching to run her manicured fingers through his hair, and Nick steeled his spine against the urge to shiver. “You really have so much to learn, don’t you? You don’t need to take your clothes off to make a boy do what you want.”

“Now a spot of punishment though,” Prudence interjected, sounding impatient with the direction the conversation was heading in. “That we could help you with, I’m getting tired of seeing you running around looking like a needy mortal. It's not a good look.”

“I don’t want to punish him,” Nick protested.

“Really? Because I would. Especially when he's already got Luke Chalfant in his lap. Sign of bad character if there ever was one. I could have told you that.”

“Yeah well, you weren’t around to tell me, were you.” Nick growled, trying to swallow back an unexpectedly fierce surge of bitterness, and thought Prudence looked rather surprised if the flutter of her eyelashes were anything to go by.

“How about we make him impotent for a while?” Dorcas said, breaking the awkward tension suddenly around the table.

“You know how to do that?” Nick quizzed with no shortage of alarm, the feeling growing at the identical smirks that spread across their faces.

“Course, which witch doesn’t?” Prudence scoffed. “Now are you in or what?”

Nick looked over to see Luke Chalfant reach over and ruffle Tristan’s floppy, dark hair. His gaze snapped back to Prudence and he nodded with gritted teeth.

“Excellent,” Prudence said with a self-satisfied smirk, while Dorcas leaned forward with a conspiratorial smirk.

“Promise you, nothing will be as satisfying as the temper tantrums he’s going to be throwing after a few days of magically induced flaccidness.”

“You girls are scary sometimes,” Nick groaned, and their giggles told him they took it as the grudging compliment he intended it to be.

Somehow Nick found it in himself to chuckle along with them, and when Agatha ruffled his hair again, the achy feel in his chest felt a little less jagged.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nick is canonically sexually fluid, so it was important to me that I put in some sort of romance with a guy into this story. I wish it could have been a happier one, maybe it could have been under different circumstances, but I am committed to my mission of putting Nick through the wringer. 
> 
> Next chapter, Nick takes his dark baptism and starts to really grow into his powers.


	5. Interlude, Dark Lord

Nick tastes blood in his mouth when he kneels before the stone altar in the woods to let Father Blackwood paint the Dark Lord’s blessing across his brow. The air is loaded, full of an unholy hush that seems to deaden every sound except the crackle from the lit torches. 

He doesn’t flinch when his hand is cut, but shivers when he finishes the last flourish on the signature that seals him into the mighty company of the generations of witches and warlocks that came before him. 

Blackwood fades as Nick drops the quill, the chanting from the rest of the coven too, and his vision darkens. Then comes the fear, welling up inside of him from out of nowhere – it’s as though someone’s behind him, breathing warm and heavy on his neck, like the snort of a wild animal. 

His hands are shaking, mouth dry like bone, but then the clawed hand of the Dark Lord settles on his shoulder and ache and bliss vie for attention as the smell of sulphur fills Nick’s nose. The brand of his claw sears into Nick’s skin, and Nick laughs as he opens himself up to the pain, feeling the horror spill into ecstasy when he submits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first of what I'm referring to as the satanic interludes of this story. It's basically a tease - they're primarily split up into separate chapters for effect. 
> 
> The next proper chapter will be along later this week.


	6. Acolyte

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I had originally planned for this to go out friday, but after the very sad news we got today (or yesterday? I'm confused about time differences), I figured we could all use a bit more caos-content. So voila. Hope you enjoy.

Everyone had told him that his dark baptism would change everything all at once. 

It didn’t. 

No matter how much blood he was painted with by Satan’s altar in the woods, it didn’t change the fact that he was still the skinny, nerdy orphan boy that no one could really figure out what to do with.

He was not like Prudence, who’d gone into the woods the month before he did, and came back brimming with power under the blood and dirt from her baptism, gaze full of the allure of the newly blessed. Nor was he creepy Alistair who’d only gotten creepier by signing away his name to the Dark Lord.

When Nick looked into the mirror, nothing appeared to have changed. His hair was just as unruly as always, his gaze not weirder or more penetrating than before. 

He could see the disappointment in the eyes of the teachers too as they looked him over, could see most of them loose interest as the days passed and he’d shown no real amplification of his personal attributes or skillset. Another run of the mill warlock that demanded no special effort. Another anti-climax. 

For the first time in years Nick resorted to physical violence. He sought out Amalia, and let his familiar run him absolutely ragged through the woods, mercilessly throwing him down over and over as he tried to pin down the bulk of her impossibly strong wolf body, yelling and snarling as he did. He felt guilty afterwards, as he saw how delighted she was at the return of his ferocity, the experience leaving him with a bad taste in his mouth as he scrambled back to the academy to strip out of his torn clothing. 

He was angry enough that he half considered finding the Book of the Beast and scratch out his name, demanding it back if the great Satan had no intention of honouring his end of the bargain. 

In the end it was Cassius who realised how the Dark Lord had chosen for Nick’s gifts to manifest as he remarked on Nick’s choice of reading material. 

“Why are you back to Songs of Bondage, Nicholas?” 

“Huh?” 

Nick blinked, blearily pulling himself from the pages of the book as if he’d been dreaming. 

“I thought you had abandoned it after chucking it across the room last month when you complained about, what was the phrase…” Cassius said, with a rare, amused smile. “The bad poetry of crusty old witches?” 

Nick frowned down at the book. He hadn’t even thought about what he’d grabbed, just reaching for the nearest volume to distract himself. Now that Cassius made him aware though, Nick remembered the frustration he’d felt the last time he’d opened it. 

Reading it had felt a bit like climbing down a rusty ladder in the dark, foot fumbling for the next safe rung. A rage inducing feeling for Nick, who was so used to master the books he read, but conjuring was hard, the geometrics and equations mind bending to wrap his head around. 

But reading it now it was though he instinctively sensed where each step was, easily descending through the complicated layers of meanings and references in the book's circular logic. 

“I guess I was in the right frame of mind for it today,” he mumbled, uncertain, as his gaze skittered over the ornate, gothic text. 

“What have you found out then?” Cassius asked and put aside his own stack of tomes to pick up Nick's. 

“Well,” Nick said, getting the odd sense that Cassius was not making an idle inquiry, despite sounding almost bored as he flicked through the pages. “One of the chapters suggests a modification on the traditional binding spells by not emphasising the binding of the body, but the binding of the will instead.” 

“Interesting.” Cassius simply replied, handing the book back. “In that case I have a few other texts that I think would be of interest to you, young Scratch.” 

Cassius suggesting new reading materials was nothing out of the ordinary, but as the days passed Nick began to realise what was happening. The librarian kept putting more obscure codexes and dissertations in front of him that Nick had either been cut off from or failed to understand before. Cassius seemed happier the more theses from the finest binders and conjurers that he put in front of Nick. 

Nick had always been clever of course, it was his only real source of pride, but now he breezed through texts that even advanced students had difficulty with. For Nick, it seemed, the powers from the Dark Lord didn’t come in in a rush, but snuck in like the tide, slowly morphing him from the inside out, blood and brain matter shifting to make room for the magics. 

The changes were somehow both less and more terrifying than his first, mortifying, pubescent growth spurt – fewer spontaneous erections and less acne, but more nightmares and out of body experiences. Through it all Nick found comfort in the symmetric beauty of the spells – the rhyming couplets, the geometrics spinning ever outwards to harness the power that thrummed through him. 

And Nick knew that the conjuring circles and binding spells were his way to win back the attention of his instructors – truly gifted conjurers and binders were a rarity among witches, let alone someone skilled in both disciplines. There was a reason why Edward Spellman had been so revered despite his radical ideas. 

However, Nick's first attempt to impress the teachers did not go according to plan. 

While summoning a greater demon filled Nick with a rush of power unlike anything he had experienced before, the corresponding panic as it tore loose of his control was a rush of a completely different kind, nose bleeding with the snap of the magic bonds breaking.

The horrifying, twisted creature trampled several students underfoot as it ran amok through the academy with Nick hot on its heels yelling for everyone to get out of the way, throwing apologies to the mangled students as he went. Although Nick wasn’t altogether sorry when Luke Chalfant found his way under the crushing weight of the demon. 

When Blackwood finally caught up with them and sent the snarling fiend back to the pit, Nick was immediately dragged towards the cells below the academy. Nick staggered down the steps, Blackwood shaking him about as he rained down the mother of all lectures down on his head about his lack of control. 

But it was Brother Lovecraft who let him out the following day, his face full of smug glee as Nick scrambled out of the cell. 

“Going in half-cocked again Mr. Scratch? Seems like you’re developing a nasty habit of that.” 

Sending the instructor a glare, Nick sought out Prudence, Agatha and Dorcas, who were in the middle of one of their typical communing acts, hands and knees touching as they sat in lotus position in front of each other. 

“Can you get me a bit of Brother Lovecraft’s hair?” 

“Excuse me?” Prudence said, eyes both more focused and hazier when she opened them, nose scrunching in obvious distaste at the reek of the witch’s cell that still clung to Nick’s clothes.

“If you get it to me before Monday, I’ll make sure you can spend your weekend torturing mortal boys or whatever it is you girls do with your downtime instead of studying for his test.” 

“What hare-brained scheme are you dreaming up now, Nicky? Didn’t go too well last time,” Agatha remarked, head cocked as she looked him over. 

“I’ve got it, I swear, and I’ll lend you all of my notes just in case I don’t” 

All three of them looked him over, hands still joined, with a gaze so penetrating that Nick had to force himself not to wriggle uneasily. Their intensity was only ramping up these days after both Agatha and Prudence had had their baptism. 

Finally Prudence sighed, their gazes softening until it felt less like they were scrolling through his very thoughts. 

“We’ll get you some of his hair, after all watching you fall flat on your face will be just as amusing as watching you succeed. Funnier even.” 

Come Sunday evening, Agatha waltzed up to Nick with a smugly enigmatic smile, dumping a bunch of greying, golden blonde hair on Nick’s book. 

“As agreed.” 

“How did you get it?” Nick whispered as he snatched up the strands of hair before anyone could see. 

“Oh please,” Agatha said with a mocking laughter. “Like we’d give away our tricks.” 

As she began to depart, she stroked her fingers across his bare neck, making a warm shiver run the entire length of his spine and Nick swirled around in his chair, grabbing her hands to see if she’d plucked any hair from his head. They were empty, but the smirk on her full lips wasn’t altogether reassuring. 

“Prudence thinks you’ll fail, personally I’d like to see what happens if you succeed.” 

“I will succeed,” Nick assured her, not allowing himself a shred of doubt as Agatha disappeared around the stacks with a parting chuckle. 

“I guess we’ll see.” 

Nick was already sweating by the time that Brother Lovecraft walked into the class on Monday morning. His fingers tightened around the cord he’d woven the hair into as the teacher handed the stack of tests to Agatha.

“Good morning all, as promised you will be tested on your knowledge of witch trial history. Take a paper as it comes your way.” 

He could feel the blood pound in his temple as a paper landed on his table and he watched as Brother Lovecraft pulled out his old, Victorian pocket watch. He had officially lost his mind, Nick decided, even as he could feel himself starting to get to his feet. There was no other explanation for thinking that he would be able to bind a warlock at least two hundred years older than himself. 

“What do you think you’re doing Mr Scratch?” 

“Well, I figured instead of us doing the test, you should just tell us all of the answers.” 

“Sit down insolent boy, or I’ll…” 

Brother Lovecraft’s voice died out as Nick finished the final tie in a series of complicated knots on the cord, the older warlock’s body locking in place and his gaze becoming hazy and distant as the magics rushed out of Nick. Every single student in the room swivelled in their chairs to stare up at Nick, who couldn’t help but grin, feeling lightheaded with triumph at the shocked silence from his peers. 

“I said, how about you tell us the answers instead?” 

“Of course, should we start with the Torsäker witch trials of 1675…?” 

“That sounds like an excellent idea, sir.” 

Unsurprisingly Nick’s stunt with Brother Lovecraft cost him another harrowing stay in the witch’s cell, but it was worth it, even if he was not really sure how long he'd spend in there when he was finally let out. It was Blackwood himself who was on the other side of the door. 

“I do believe you’ve made your point, Mr. Scratch.” 

“Good to know that someone’s been paying attention,” Nick slurred, tired too his very bones, and for a moment he was sure he had gone too far – a nasty look flaring up in Blackwood’s eyes that Nick recognised especially from when the high priest would punish the sisters. 

After a few moments though – Nick didn’t blink – the high priest nodded, a look of grudging respect passing over his features. 

“I suggest you stop courting the cells then, Mr. Scratch. You’ll do much better on the surface,” Blackwood said, holding out his hand, as if to seal a deal. 

Nick took it. 

Unlike the last time Nick had been the subject of academy gossip, there was respect in the eyes of the residents of the academy when he left the cell. Although Brother Lovecraft looked consistently like he wanted to wring his neck – first order on the agenda for Nick was casting the most powerful protection spells on himself that he could scour from the library. 

There was a new sense of valuation behind the eyes of the people who watched him as the initial disbelief over Nick’s binding of Brother Lovecraft turned into curiosity as Nick kept excelling and then finally turned into active interest. The way that Blackwood kept finding excuses to talk to him about his progress in his new, more advanced classes reminded Nick of a shark circling for chum. 

What made the whole thing more disorienting was the fact that the scrutiny didn’t fade. 

Last time he had only been a person of interest until the next scandal erupted, but now it remained despite the sisters managing to give the entire boys’ dormitory – Nick excepted – nightmares for three full days after they’d all had their baptisms. 

Even in the library Nick wouldn’t be left alone anymore. People suddenly, actively seeking out his advice – even though judging from the glares Nick were getting in his conjuring and binding classes there were more than a few of the older students who did not appreciate being upstaged by a junior warlock. 

But then the touching started, and Nick really couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the petty jealousies of those less blessed by the Dark Lord than he was. 

When an interruption in his studies was accompanied with a smile and a friendly shake of his shoulder, the touching made the attention feel less as though he was being studied, and more as though he was liked. Different from Amalia’s violent affection or the sisters’ casual manhandling of him. 

Nick didn’t quite know what to do with that, didn’t know how to reciprocate it, his hands not used to touching anything softly apart from Amalia’s fur or the books in the library. 

But he was soon saved from his own awkwardness. When Nick’s shoulders started to widen from the strain of the power rolling through him, the touches changed too. The friendly touch on his shoulder became a purposeful grip on his thigh, conspiratorial whispers exchanged for an insistent kiss to his neck. 

It was easy to know what to do with his hands then, or at least it was easy to follow to lead of the would be lovers who reached for him, and Nick marvelled when he felt a thigh tremble against his side, relished the plea for the slick friction of his tongue. 

It felt like conjuring, pulling something fresh and new out of the bodies that entwined with his. A different sort of magic. Nick didn’t want any kind of magic to be outside of his grasp, and so he let himself drown in the sea of hands of mouths that eagerly rose up to meet him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nick is so full of self doubt underneath all the swagger, it makes sense to me that he has to struggle a bit to find his legs before he became the academy's golden boy. Also a bit of struggle is more interesting than just voila, insta-awesome. 
> 
> Next chapter, as things have begun to go Nick's way at the school, someone doesn't want him to go down that road.


	7. Binding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have given up on having any kind of regular update calendar for this story. It's apparently not going to happen, but I try my best. 
> 
> As in the last chapter featuring Amalia, I want to reiterate the warnings of abuse and violence that are flagged in the tags - the years haven't made Nick and Amalia's relationship any easier. Quite the opposite.

The pattern wasn’t in itself difficult to make. Nick had traced it so many times that it seemed almost like a part of him now. He knew every line and every curve, could see them in front of him when he closed his eyes. Like glowing strings.

He had never attempted drawing it in a scale quite so big as he was about to attempt though.

It had taken him a while to find a medium that would work in the wide spread, open clearing. The usual chalk drawings wouldn’t work on the porous ground and thread just got tangled in the high grass. In the end he’d settled on rocks after seeing how clearly the jewel toned sands stood out against the greens and lilacs and powder blues in the meadow, and he had to kick it away to scatter it in the dirt.

Nature based spells didn’t come quite as easily to him though. He’d seen Elspeth do it, the open, urging structure to the magics she used that she made seem easy, but Nick that had never quite been able to get right.

Nick had to rely on sheer force instead, and sweat broke out on his lip and under his arm pits as he kneeled down in the grass, digging his fingers into the dirt and calling the pebbles and rocks to him.

The ground tremored and shifted beneath him, nature resisting the command to rearrange itself into the well-ordered geometrics of the spell circle. Grimacing, he squeezed his eyes shut and visualised the pattern harder, funneling more magic into the spell and the stones of the ground finally obeyed his order, shivering into place.

He walked the circle afterwards, having to use the traces of his magic left in the stones to make sure the pattern was right before he bound them in place, the entire thing hidden under the tall grass.

And then all that was left to do was wait. And worry.

The bloom of a headache had started up behind his eyes, but he wasn’t sure if it was the strain of channeling the magics or a delayed hangover from the night before. Sleep had been elusive by the time he’d staggered into bed and he’d tossed and turned, until he’d given up and gone in search of his old notes.

The pattern had stayed hidden in his notes since the first time he had tried using it after finding it in his mother and Edward Spellman’s treatise.

But that had been before.

Before he’d felt the Dark Lord’s touch, and before he’d properly understood the weights and anchors of the bindings.

And before Amalia had been forced to share him with others.

He leaned forward, bracing his arms on his knees. There was dried blood caught in the hair on his arms, and Nick scratched at it, nerves fizzing to life with the phantom pain of his freshly healed gashes.

Wearing yesterday’s clothes, the smell of sex and sweat clung to him still. The whole evening seemed a little blurry now, coated in a haze of absinthe and lust, the low red-golden lights of Dorian’s club – and then horror. Memories clipped in and out as he tried to remember the details.

It had been one of Dorian’s rare co-mixers. Witches laughing at the forbidden thrill of being invited into the warlocks’ space. Although Dorian had seemed to regret the decision of allowing the girls into the club when Delilah Gibson managed to drag Nick away from the bar and Dorian increasingly spicy flirtations.

She had been flirting with him the entire week leading up to the party, and her mouth was the hungriest of all the ones he kissed during the night, warm and greedy against his as they danced. Her hands eager to touch and urging him to touch back, run his fingers through the fall of her long golden hair until he was dizzy with it.

He appeared a mess when he took a look in the mirror in the bathroom later on. Hair in a disarray from Delilah’s eager hands, cheeks flushed with the intoxication of touch. It wouldn’t take much for him to ignite now, arousal pooled low and heavy in his belly, but the anticipation alone was good too.

He came face to face with Prudence as he stepped back into the club, draped against the wall and staring at the mess of gyrating bodies with a look half amused, half heated.

Following the direction of her gaze, he caught sight of Agatha and Dorcas twining around a guy whose face Nick couldn’t properly see for the molten shine of Dorcas’ hair.

“Too lazy to do your own conquesting tonight, Pru?” Nick quizzed as he settled against the wall next to her, plucking her drink from her hands and taking a sip, grimacing at the taste. He still hadn’t learned to enjoy vermouth.

“Well, you’ve already claimed most of the dancefloor, Nicky,” she said, mock plaintively, and Nick grinned at the acerbic cut of her tone. “Plan to fuck all of them tonight?”

“If Delilah’s in a sharing mood, sure,” Nick said with a non-plussed shrug and Prudence rolled her eyes, snatching her glass back from him before she spoke again.

“You’d better be ready for a repeat performance of whatever you were doing with Morgaine last weekend. That’s what Delilah seemed interested in sampling when I heard her chatter in the bathroom.”

“That’s easily enough done, I’m an accommodating sort,” Nick said, hiding a grin when he caught sight of Prudence sidelong glance at him.

“What did you do to Morgaine?” She quizzed, sounding almost aggravated at herself for asking, and Nick poked back at her aggravation with wide grinning amusement.

“Why, you interested in trying it out yourself?”

Prudence predictably scoffed at his half-teased flirtation, the noise audible despite the beat of the music. “It takes more than a slutty disposition to impress me, Nicky.”

“Yes, well we can’t all be bitches.”

“I suppose not,” Prudence mused, lips pursed. “Bitches need someone to trample after all.”

He was stopped in making an answer to that when Delilah Gibson decided she was done waiting and came over to wrap herself around Nick again, mouth still just as hungry, her muttered suggestions equally filthy. He felt Prudence leave her position next to them and pulled back enough to stare down at Deliah’s flushed face.

“Come on,” she giggled, pulling him towards the exit to the club.

The academy was quiet as a grave when they made it back, the few people who weren’t in the club long since having made their way for the bed.

His dorm was empty, dimly lit and he got Delilah crowded onto his bed, her legs coming up to bracket his hips, the heel of her stiletto rubbing at Nick’s calf until he shivered at the sensation. She moaned when he got his hand under her skirt and stared up at him with such a wanting expression on her face that Nick had to lean down and kiss her to see if he could taste it on her mouth.

Delilah was loud enough that it took him much too long to notice the low growling off to the side of them, but as soon as he did, every muscle in his body froze.

“What’s wrong?” Delilah sounded breathless and impatient beneath him when he stopped touching her, but Nick didn’t pay attention to what she was saying, scrabbling back in a crouch, eyes wildly searching.

The glow of Amalia’s gaze caught his attention first, and as she stepped into the light, he struggled to understand what he was seeing. Her body wasn’t just morphed into the half-humanoid-half lupine shape she had started to favour, but she was wearing human clothes too, an old-fashioned lace dress that made the already unnatural shape of her seem even more grotesque.

And then Delilah screamed. Amalia was on her so fast that Nick barely managed to understand what was happening before Delilah flopped back to the bed, limp as a rag doll. Amalia raised her arm to strike again, and Nick thrust himself forward, forcing Amalia away from the bed with a burst of magic before she could do more harm.

“Stop!” Nick roared, jumping up to meet her half way when she lunged again, and tearing at her fur and the fabric of her dress. “Amalia, stop!”

He cast the teleport spell on pure instinct, voice raw and the force behind the spell sent the both of them skidding across the dirt when they hit the ground again in the woods. Amalia didn’t remain rattled for long, coming at him fast. The first blow was so hard that Nick could barely see or hear anything at all, staggering to remain upright.

Her second strike hit his arm, claws ripping his skin open and Nick screamed, dropping to his knees.

Amalia growled, jerks going through her limbs as though she wanted to strike again, but didn’t, body stalking in tense circles around him.

“Why did you hurt her,” Nick gasped, clutching at his arm to stem the gush of blood, not quite sure that she’d let him do magic right now without retaliation.

 _She wanted to own you_ , Amalia said, voice sounding more animalistic than he’d heard her in a long while despite her more humanoid appearance and the white lace dress.

He was still reeling with the outburst of violence. It wasn’t the first time they had argued about his lovers at the academy, Amalia resenting everything that broke into his time with her, but it had never gotten so vicious before. Never before turned into an actual assault on one of them.

“She just wanted to have sex with me,” Nick protested.

Amalia pushed him onto his back, her body not able to pin him down quite as well when she was in this form as in her full wolf form, but the weight behind her paws still made him gasp for breath.

 _Own you, change you_ , she snarled.

“Amalia, I’m bleeding,” he finally said after a moment and the wild rage in her yellow eyes faded a little.

Nick got into a seated position as she moved off of him, and waited a moment until he was sure she wouldn’t strike again before he began muttering healing spells to make his torn arm knit itself back together again.

_They own, they don’t love. They’re incapable of it._

He wanted to shout at her that what she was doing wasn’t love either. Love was described in violent terms in all the mortal books he had read, but it didn’t actually exercise violence or control upon people. It wasn't supposed to be like that. 

“I need to check on Delilah,” Nick muttered, struggling to his feet, and bared his teeth in his own silent snarl when Amalia growled at him. “I need to find out if you killed her.”

 _Still breathing when you pulled us out of there_ , Amalia said, sounding for all intents and purposes like that hadn’t been the plan.

“Well, in that case I need to go and erase her memory before she wakes up.”

 _Stay_ , Amalia said, looking ready to jump at him again.

“No, they’ll come after you if they find out what you did,” he said and ran his palm along his now healed arm, before he reached out and smeared his blood across Amalia’s muzzle, fingers slipping across the smooth surface of her teeth.

Her face contracted, as though she couldn’t figure out what to do. Confusion and anger flickering through the narrowing of her eyes.

“I’ll be back,” he muttered before he teleported himself back to the academy.

Delilah was still unconscious on his bed, the side of her rosy cheeked face already purpling with a bruise, and Nick grimaced as he knelt down, muttering a quick healing spell to remove it before he launched into an incantation to modify her memory.

It didn’t right stealing her memories like that, but it was either that or have Blackwood send the hunters into the woods to kill Amalia.

They’d all seen it happen the year before after Roxana Melville’s hound-familiar had successfully savaged another student – Roxane’s wails could be heard throughout the dormitories for the entirety of the following day until the teachers had moved her to a solitary room in another wing of the academy.

“Nick?”

Her voice was slurred, questioning when she woke, her eyes a wet shine under the flutter of her eyelashes in the dimness of the room.

“Think you got a bit too much to drink there, Delilah,” he muttered.

“Well, that’s embarrassing,” she said with a strained laugh to match her words before she pushed up to kiss him again. 

Nick was too tightly wound to sink into it, cold sweat gathering on the small of his back.

“I’m better now, we could still…” she began, Nick interrupting her with a shake of his head.

“I prefer to have you lucid enough to scream my name properly,” he said, putting enough heat behind the lie that Delilah giggled in response.

“I expect you to deliver on that promise, Scratch,” she flirted back and got off the bed.

“Count on it.”

Amalia’s words echoed in his head as he flopped back onto the bed, the taste of licorice from the absinthe intermingling with the coppery taste of blood and fear.

_Own you. Change you._

She had used many of the same words when she had discovered Father Blackwood’s interest in him a few months before.

With Nick’s promise to stay out of trouble, the high priest had kept his unspoken end of the bargain and rewarded that. Unlike the other instructors who seemed almost aggravated at how fast Nick was mastering his lessons, Blackwood seemed more amused by it all, letting Nick gain access to books no freshly baptised warlock was usually allowed to put his hands on.

“I see no reason to hinder brilliance, Nicholas,” Blackwood would say as he presented Nick with another book.

The use of his first name when they were alone in Blackwood’s chambers seemed like a new declaration of trust, one equal to the permission to be a granted a look at Blackwood’s private collection of manuscripts and artifacts. Nick’s gaze kept being dragged to the polygonal teal sphere that he had now come to recognise as an acheron configuration, and his attention was not going unnoticed.

“One of Edward Spellman’s creations,” Blackwood finally said one day as he picked it up and tossed it towards Nick.

Nick reached for it with no hesitation, a frisson of excitement travelling along his nerves as he felt the hum of power in the structure. He’d encountered acheron configurations before, but never one so exquisitely made. It made sense that Edward Spellman would be behind the construction. 

“I’m throwing a little get together for some of the more gifted warlocks at the academy in a week or so, how about you see what you can do with this and tell me what you’ve discovered by then. Careful though, it’s quite addictive.”

“The Judas society?” Nick quizzed, having heard the name thrown about before.

“That is the one.”

Amalia hadn’t liked that. Telling him as much when she found him afterwards, her eyes a yellow glow in the low light of the corridor outside Blackwood’s suite of rooms. Nick hadn’t even discovered her spying before she was practically on top of him.

_You shouldn’t get so close to him._

“What?” Nick said, throwing an anxious glance around him to make sure no one else was nearby, hating he was getting so used to jumping at shadows all the time.

_I’ve seen them before. Heard all the disgusting things he says and they repeat without question. Sheep the lot of them._

“What are you talking about?”

_Your priest and his boys. All they want to do is own other people. The women especially. Kept for creatures to mount and to rule._

Nick grimaced. What Amalia was saying had enough ring of truth to it that he couldn’t dismiss it as another one of her paranoid, jealous rants with stink of violence behind it. Blackwood’s thoughts on witches weren’t exactly a secret, and he’d seen enough in the high priest’s chambers to confirm it to be more than just gossip.

_He wants to make you his slave like all the rest of the mindless sheep. Are you a sheep, Nicholas?_

“No,” Nick muttered, clutching the acheron configuration with eager hands. Surely he could endure a bit of eye rolling discourse if it granted him access to the books and objects that would allow him to better himself.

As if sensing his thoughts, Amalia snarled, biting out at him fast enough that Nick barely managed to lurch out of the way in time, feeling the displacement of air as Amalia’s teeth snapped shut in front of his face.

_Wolves are not slaves to any man. Don’t let him make you one._

The sound of a branch breaking startled Nick back to the present, to his body, sore from remaining in the same position for so long, headache throbbing freshly behind his eyes.

In the woods, the combination of the torn lace dress and her half-morphed body seemed even more grotesque than it had in the dormitory, her muzzle still red from the blood he had wiped there the night before.

He should have done this much sooner, he realised now as he struggled to his feet. He shouldn’t have let himself be dissuaded when he failed to banish her the first time, and only succeeded in giving himself a nosebleed.

He knew she had to have had some kind of idea of what he had been trying to do back then. Perhaps that was the problem, the reason for why she had been holding on so tightly ever since she’d licked the nose bleed from his face with a strange, affronted look on her face.

“You never used to wear that form this much,” Nick said, looking her over.

 _Makes it easier to walk the academy_ , she said, the white lace of the dress brushing against the green grass, staining it even further.

“Perhaps you should stop coming to the academy, it's not good for us anyways,” he said with more force than intended, words coming out in a rush before he lost his nerve.

Amalia immediately started to growl, and Nick’s heart leapt into his throat when he realised she was stepping into the circle.

_You don’t get to decide that. You’re my charge._

“Not anymore. I own myself now.”

Amalia lunged, but Nick was prepared, pivoting out the way of her charging body, feet brushing against the stones of the binding pattern as he stumbled out of it and roared the words that activated the spell.

Her scream echoed through the forest when she threw herself against the borders of the circle.

Nick held tight onto the binding, nose starting to bleed as Amalia howled and snarled, trying to break apart the pattern with her claws. Nick sent more power into the spell, the stones melting at the sheer force of it, fusing together and burning her paws.

“Please stop struggling, Amalia,” He shouted, half wild with terror as he saw her body mindlessly shifting between her forms, the transformation coming in terrifying lurches that tore her soiled dress to pieces – her spine constricting, then elongating, rib cage crackling as it widened.

“You’re hurting yourself. Please stop,” he yelled again, trying to make his voice carry over her savage screams.

It seemed to take hours before she stopped fighting. The jerk in her limbs slowing, and her enraged howls turning into low whines and then no sound as all as the magical bindings wound their way around her, suddenly pitiful in her bound stillness.

When he stuck his hands into the circle, it felt like touching raw electricity, the power of it a sharp, nauseous pound in his guts.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t want it to hurt,” he whispered, only realising he was crying when the tears began to fall onto her fur along with the blood dripping from his nose.

There was fear in Amalia’s eyes alongside the rage as she stared up at him, but when he tugged weakly on her shaggy neck fur that disappeared, a betrayed hurt taking over and Nick started to shake.

 _You won’t survive without me_ , she whispered in his head, voice soft as her fur.

“I will, I managed this, didn’t I,” he said, trying to reassure her, smearing tears and blood across his face when he tried to wipe his nose, wincing at the sharp pain there. “I promised you I would be strong,”

_They can’t love you like I do._

“Your kind of love isn’t good for me anymore” Nick whispered, feeling her enraged grief like an echo of his own, and flinched with it, not sure whose emotions were spiking out of control the most.

“I love you, but please don’t try to find your way back here, Amalia.”

It took him several tried before he managed to get through the spell, fingers stroking across her heaving flank, her breathing picking up speed every time he faltered in the latin phrasing under the glare of her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, as he finally got himself under control to get through the invocation without interruption.

For a moment time seemed to stand still, an impossibly long extended breath, and then her form blurred, Nick catching her wild, yellow gaze a final time before she disappeared. The stone circle tremored around him and rattled apart, pebbles once more.

The birds were the only ones who heard Nick weeping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was not exactly a fun chapter to write, but it was satisfying, because this was an event that I was immediately curious about when it was first mentioned on the show. And I got to play around a bit with the show's rather vague werewolf lore - like, Amalia can't have a human form right, because that would be fucking weird to have a familiar of human appearance. So full wolf or werewolf it is. 
> 
> In the next chapter, Nick celebrates his first Lupercalia and his relationship with the sisters changes. 
> 
> And then we're not far off from a certain blonde-haired witch turning up.


	8. Lupercalia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like writing about Nick and Prudence bantering way too much to limit myself. 
> 
> So here's some banter, some sex and Nick feeling way more intensely about both than a warlock probably should.

”So…”

”Yeah, so…” Prudence echoed, the drawl of her voice prolonging the vowels until Nick had to roll his eyes at it.

Everywhere in the woods around them they could hear the faint chatter and laughter coming from their fellow students who already seemed to be well into the Lupercalian ritual, misbehaving under the moon.

And judging from a few scattered moans they could already hear echoing amongst the trees, not everyone was sticking to the abstinence part of the night either.

He and Prudence on the other hand had contentiously been staring at each other in perfect silence for the past half hour as they’d spread the blanket on the forest floor and set out the oysters and figs for eating. Neither one of them had taken the initiative to settle down on the ground though.

“I’m going first then?” he grumbled as he finally started running out of patience.

“Seems only fair,” Prudence sniped back, crossing her arms and nodding in the general direction of Nick’s belt buckle.

“Why is that?”

Prudence just raised an eyebrow and Nick huffed, running a restless hand through his dark curls. He wasn’t in the habit of backing down from a battle of wills with Prudence. Needling her was one of the best thrills of his life, but the standoff was starting to feel ridiculous. It wasn’t like Prudence hadn’t seen him naked before given how much bacchanals were a stable of their community and how many spells were amplified by exposing more skin.

“Fine,” he huffed and reached down to pull his sweater and t-shirt off in one movement, unbuckling the belt with little of the seduction that he usually put into the move when he was with a new lover.

“You’ll do,” Prudence remarked as Nick had gotten down to his boxers.

“Glad to meet your high standards.”

“Well, you’re no Terrence, but needs must I suppose,” Prudence said with a mocking twist to her lips as she started on her own dress, loosening ribbons and buttons until it dropped to the ground and she stepped out of it leaving her in delicate black lace underwear.

Nick grimaced at her mention of Terrence. Prudence hadn’t made a secret of the fact that she had intended to spent Lupercalia with him – older, taller and broader than Nick – and yet, as the matching had wound down, Salome was the one who had ended up on Terrence’s lap and Prudence had climbed onto Nick’s with an obviously disgruntled expression. He was curious to figure out what spell Salome had used to trick the matching.

“Please, like Terrence would ever be able to be a proper partner for you. He’s a middling warlock at best.”

“You know, funnily enough it wasn’t because of his spell craft I was wanting to match with him. It’s because of his really big…”

“Yeah, it’s pretty impressive,” he interrupted, laughing, and Prudence’s face lit up with speculative amusement.

“Got there before me, Nicky?”

“Sadly no,” Nick admitted, giving her a wink before he elaborated. “Just got a very nice eyeful the last time Dorian threw one of his parties.”

Prudence rolled her eyes at that, but the smirk didn’t disappear from her face as she stepped onto the blanket and shimmied out of her stockings. There was artfulness in how she draped herself across the blanket, as though she was settling down on a luxurious settee to be painted rather than laying down on the ground for a moon spell.

Even with all the swagger he’d cultivated since his baptism, Nick couldn’t quite match her grace, and so he watched her with equal measures of appreciation and envy as he obeyed her wordless invitation to lay down when she patted the empty spot on the blanket next to her.

A sudden noise next to them had Nick jolt upwards with shock, feeling the magics surge into palm of his hands. At least it did until Prudence knocked him back down hard enough that he grunted and glared up at her grinning face.

“So jumpy golden boy, no one needs friendly fire tonight,” she said, and Nick followed the direction of her gaze to the raven fluffing their wings on a nearby, low-hanging branch.

He let out a breath, and dropped the last shreds of the half-formed spell, feeling more than a little embarrassed over how hard he’d overreacted.

 _That’s not Terrence_ , Prudence familiar commented, and despite being grateful for the distracting rush of annoyance, Nick sneered up in the direction of the goblin masquerading as a glossy-feathered raven.

“I’m much better than Terrence.”

“Jury’s still out on that, Nicky,” Prudence shot back with a mocking smile before turning her attention back to her familiar. “Move your wings, Charon, I don’t need a sentry tonight.”

_You sure? I could kill him if the night is a disappointment._

“I’ll burn your tail feathers,” Nick snapped, and the familiar’s scratchy cackle echoed in his head as they obeyed orders and flew off while Nick tried to regather his dignity.

He hadn’t realized he was quite so nervous about spending the night alone in the woods. In so many ways the woods were still Amalia’s domain in his head and even now it was all too easy to imagine her charging through the ferns and bushes to launch herself at Prudence’s throat.

“You plan to stare into space all night? Because in that case I might call Charon back.”

“You’re more than capable of killing me yourself, Pru. Horribly so at that,” Nick remarked, struggling into a seated position once more, and despite the cold sweat he felt a grin tug at his lips when he saw how smug that remark made Prudence look. 

“Yeah, but I just did my nails, don’t want to get blood on them.”

“Aww, you made yourself pretty for me?”

“Fuck off, warlock,” Prudence snapped, and he sniggered as he reached into the basket for the milk and blood from the goat the academy had slaughtered in the courtyard earlier that day.

He noted with a grimace that the blood had started to clot a little.

“Can we agree that this part is kind of dumb?” He asked as he popped the lid on the jar while Prudence reached for the silver knife.

“It’s tradition,“ Prudence declared, plunging the knife’s point into the jar and raised it to drag across his brow, saying the ritual words with a clear, steady voice before handing the knife over to Nick who said his part with enough of a sarcastic edge that it made Prudence glare at him.

“I mean, if we kept entirely with tradition, I’m supposed to whip you with a thong cut from the skin of sacrificial animal, aren’t I?”

“You’d die if you tried,” Prudence said with enough venom behind it that Nick laughed appreciatively as she wiped the blood off his forehead with the milk.

“Though you could certainly stand to be taught a lesson with a bit of whipping, you shameless hussy,” she added, eyes narrowing while she chuckled, as if she wasn’t entirely joking.

The rush of excitement following her words wasn’t altogether unexpected and Nick was grateful that he could hide his reaction by preoccupying himself with laying down. He wasn’t quite ready for Prudence to have that to hold over his head when she was in a taunting mood.

The moon winked down at them through the tree branches, and Nick shivered as he felt the energy from it soak through his skin.

The subtle heat of the moon’s magic made him feel a little lightheaded and the last of the residual anxiousness from the shock was burning off, like mist off of a lake.

“So what was the deal with you girls and Elliot and Eugene a few weeks ago? The rumors were wild,” he asked, welcoming more of the gossamer powers streaming from the night sky with a smile.

“Excuse me?”

Prudence didn’t exactly sound offended or surprised, more like long suffering and Nick shrugged, feeling her shift next to him.

“Just a question.”

“I think we’re supposed to be more solemn about this whole thing,” Prudence said, as though he had been caught blaspheming the Dark Lord rather than make an attempt to liven the conversation.

“You want us to lie here and not talk for the next five hours?”

“I have long since given up hope that I could ever get you to be quiet for that long,” Prudence remarked, and Nick could hear the eye roll even if he couldn’t see it.

Sighing darkly, Prudence shifted next to him again – Nick caught the subtle arch of her torso out of the corner of his eye when she folded her arms above her head, moonlight catching the silver embroidery on her bra.

“We tied them up for the weekend, Elliot and Eugene, intercepted a few of Father Blackwood’s whips,” Prudence said, and suddenly he understood the reason behind all the bruises Elliot was sporting when Nick had hooked up with him a few days later.

“We went through a big chunk of the spells in Delights of the Pompadour,” Prudence continued, sounding almost nostalgic about the referral to a famous book of sex related spells. Although Nick could sympathize, himself having made use of several of them. “You’ve never seen a man plead the way he does after spending a weekend having sex and not being allowed to come.”

The startled rush of lust was back, this time much more potent, enough for him to tense up beside her. Prudence reacted immediately, quick as a shark smelling blood in the water, and flipped onto her stomach to stare down into his face.

“You like that idea, don’t you?” She purred, barely waiting for Nick to give a non-committal shrug – no doubt seeing straight through his attempt at casualness. “Should have known you were a submissive little bitch, Nicky.”

“Please, I’m a verse if anything,” Nick drawled as he found his way back to nonchalance, and got up on one elbow as he stared right back at her.

His fingers itched with the sudden urge to trace his fingers across her skin where the strap of her bra dug into her shoulder, and he could hear himself sound a bit absentminded when he added.

“Morgaine could tell you as much.”

It wasn't that he had never noticed Prudence's beauty before. She was gorgeous in a way that demanded attention, but it had always seemed more like a fact of life than something that had anything to do with him. Right now, it seemed very much personal, especially with the warm arousal tightening in his belly.

"It's kind of interesting though," Prudence remarked, bringing Nick back to the moment.

He realized that she too was looking him over with a novel sort of curiosity, gaze resting on his abs that were standing out more clearly in the combative half crunch he’d raised himself into.

"Academy's golden boy, all that power, and then you really just want to be tied down and used.”

“Nothing wrong with letting a girl take charge and rough me up for a bit, in or outside the bedroom” Nick said, and meant it, Edward Spellman’s thoughts on the church’s demeaning of witches fresh in his mind.

“Not that many boys at the academy who share that opinion, Nicky.”

“Well, most of the boys at the academy are idiots,” Nick said with a contemptuous sniff, and Prudence laughed, the sound sounding delighted rather than mocking or vicious.

“Not counting yourself in that group then?” Prudence muttered, sounding very much like she had her own opinion on that matter.

“Of course not. I’m no middling warlock,” Nick replied with an eye roll in Prudence’s general direction.

“Supercilious and shameless though.”

“As all good witches and warlocks should be.”

“So what did you do to Morgaine,” Prudence asked, the change in subject coming fast enough that it startled a laugh out of Nick, and he let himself flop back to the ground, arranging himself a little more seductively this time

Prudence’s eyes narrowed at him, but judging from the way her gaze tiptoed down the lines of his body, she wasn’t entirely unaffected.

“Let’s just say Morgaine left my bed very sated and happy,” he replied, enjoying the exasperated noise coming from the back of Prudence’ throat, and didn’t attempt to guard against the punch she delivered to his shoulder.

“I could read your mind,” she threatened, and Nick’s own hackles went up.

“That would take the fun out of it.”

For a moment Prudence kept staring at him, and Nick tried to figure out if he could feel her scroll through his head. He was pretty sure he had gotten better at noticing the sisters reading his thoughts. Of course there was the trouble of him not knowing how many times he missed it too.

“Give me some of the figs, golden boy,” she said, giving his shoulder a shake for good measure.

For all Prudence’s avowals that Nick was a hussy, he quite enjoyed the anticipation of the evening. The more he looked at her, eyes tracing across the swell of her breasts, the sharp jut of her cheekbones – even more dramatic now that she’d recently shaved her head – the less weird the prospect of sleeping with her felt.

A little of it did remain though, enough to leave him feeling a little uneven footed. It felt wrong using his usual lines and techniques on Prudence. Even contemplating it felt awkward.

“Hey, sorry you got stuck with me instead of Terrence. Know it wasn’t what you wanted,” he said instead as the witching hour was starting to dwindle, watching Prudence biting into the last of the figs with an obscene gusto that made him feel a little shivery.

“Don’t worry about me. You should worry about Salome, that little bitch is going to regret thinking she could hex her way to the prize.”

“Your revenge is no doubt going to be fearsome,” Nick said, on the right side of sardonic to make Prudence’s attention snap back to him, a sharpness in her gaze that he was feeling a newfound appreciation for.

“That’s right, just you wait and see.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” he muttered, swallowing thickly and reached out to trace his fingers across the soft skin on the inside of her forearm. “How about you take some of that fury out on me for now?”

Once the words were said, they hovered between them, Prudence’s face going inscrutable as her gaze flittered between his hand and his mouth. He was wary enough to stay still, but confident enough to keep touching her. 

She leaned down quick as a striking snake, pressing her mouth to his and Nick’s lips parted reflexively under hers. Her tongue tasted sweet and tangy from the oysters and figs, and Nick reached up to curl his fingers around her neck, pulling her down to him.

The tenseness in her neck faded as the kiss went on and she settled against him. Nick gasped at the press of her breasts against his chest and the gasp turned into a groan when she reached around him to rake her nails across his shoulders. Nick retaliated by biting her lower lip and Prudence moaned, pressing her thigh against his dick as she hauled him back in for a deeper kiss. 

“You know, we don’t strictly need to stick to the abstinence part of tonight,” Nick muttered when they parted, both breathing heavy as his fingers traced across the hooks and eyes of her bra.

He was promptly pushed down flat on the blanket with a scornful snicker from Prudence.

“Overzealous slut,” she said, but this time it sounded almost affectionate.

By the time Prudence tumbled him into the dirt the following night during the breathlessness of the hunt, Nick was already pent up. The ritual seemed thrilling rather than a little ridiculous when the red cape billowed around Prudence’s shoulders as she settled on top of him, the wolf pelt warm and soft under his back.

Awkwardness felt very far away, even when Prudence began what he could best describe as heckling him while they made out and struggled off each other’s clothes on the forest floor, mouths hungry and hands eager. Urging him on as he sucked her nipple into his mouth, yanking on his hair as she ground herself against his thigh.

“Girls on top right?” she drawled when she lost her patience and climbed onto him, and Nick half-laughed, half-moaned as she began to roll her hips.

It was a first, having a girl antagonizing him like that while having sex, but Nick wasn’t not into it, setting out to prove Prudence wrong when she accused him of not putting his back into it. Wrapping an arm around her, Nick intensified his efforts, grasped at whatever part of her warm flesh he could reach until Prudence's huffed breaths became cries and she stopped giving him shit, and instead whimpered for him to "dont stop, don't stop, don't stop". 

“Fucking hell, Pru.” He panted when she finally pushed off of him, leaving him feeling wrung out and shivery.

"So, there is something to the hype," Prudence gasped, somehow still managing to sound haughty despite her breathlessness.

"I should hope so," he said, reaching out to run the palm of his hand across her thigh with a smug chuckle. "I have an excellent work ethic."

Prudence sighed, spreading herself wider for him in invitation.

"Not too sensitive?" He questioned, even as his fingers dipped between her legs.

“Just pay attention to what you’re doing. You’re the golden boy, shouldn’t be too difficult for you,” Prudence demanded, her eyes bright when she reached up to tug on his hair as if for good measure and Nick obeyed with a wide grin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who knew that boiling down two years of time and a whole mess of emotional entanglements would be difficult? Cue unhinged giggling from me. 
> 
> So yeah, I had to split up this chapter, because the finale of it was causing me way too many problems. A bout of existential angst around whether to say yes to a job assignment in New York didn't exactly help me either (I ended up saying no). 
> 
> Hopefully, if all goes well, I should have the rest of the chapter, which will now be chapter 9, up next week. 
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unseemingowl) too, come and say hi :)


	9. Sisters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who knew it's so hard to write about threesomes or foursomes? So many damn limbs to keep track of. 
> 
> After the fun banter of last week we're back to a heavier dose of our regularly scheduled angst, because they're all such emotional dumpster fires. And as a far as triggers go, I'll just remind you that Nick told Sabrina that he broke up with the sisters because they messed with his head. I'm making an attempt to go into that here, so be forewarned.

The girls had gone quiet. At least Nick was pretty sure they had, it was hard to hear anything over the repeated cracks of thunder and the torrential downpour battering against the windows. As another strike of lightning lit up the darkened room, the expression on their faces said it all though. Just as awed by the spectacle as Nick felt.

He laughed, the sound drowned out the thunder that seemed to make the very walls tremble, and reached for the closest sister, ending up with an armful of Prudence to kiss. He could feel her chuckling too, the puff of her breath against his mouth before their lips met.

“How’s that for a spell?” he purred into her ear in a break between the sounds of thunder and grinned when fresh lightning lit up the room again – the candles having long since burned out – and he saw both his own body and theirs more clearly.

They were all covered in streaks of paint, the arcane symbols they’d so enjoyed drawing on each other’s flesh at the start of the evening smeared from the sweat and grind of sex.

“We really did that?” Dorcas asked as the storm began to move further away, no longer raging right above their heads.

Prudence nodded and got back up into a seated position, her smile full of triumph as she reached out to cup Dorcas’ face, cleaning off a smudge of white paint on her cheek. Nick frowned at losing the feel of Prudence’s skin under his hands.

“Didn’t realise it would feel quite this potent though,” Agatha said, and forced Nick to focus on her when she took the place that Prudence had left behind, pushing him back onto the mattress to get on top of him.

“Well, I’m prime stock…” Nick drawled, voice rough from use as he reflexively reached up to grip her thighs.

“Yes, you do seem to have your uses, Nicky,” Prudence agreed, but before Nick could look in her direction, he was promptly distracted by Agatha’s hands tracing across his chest and the gentle circling of her hips.

“I’m not sure I have it in my for another round, Agatha,” Nick muttered, yet none the less met her mouth when she leaned down to kiss him.

“Absolutely sure?” she whispered back, Nick tasting lightning on her lips when her hands filled with electricity as she ran them down his sides and Nick jumped, groaning at the shock to his tired muscles.

“I’m happy to try,” he conceded, reaching up to tangle his hands in the fall of her long hair as he kissed her back and Dorcas and Prudence’s giggles intertwined with a fresh rumble of thunder.

The storm fried the electrical grid and ended up causing blackouts across Greendale and two other counties. To say that they were pleased with themselves were an understatement, Agatha and Dorcas cocky as the Dark Lord himself and Prudence walked the halls of the academy with her head held high like a queen.

The magic had been nice, more than nice.

Exhilarating.

The crackle and heat of it was exciting enough that his entire body had been humming like he was already chock full of lightning by the time they’d pulled his clothes off. It was the girls themselves who were the real thrill though. Their mouths and their hands and their power like a dark, heavy current that Nick couldn’t escape once the symbols had been painted across his chest – didn’t really want to – took it all, gave back in kind until they’d all been humming with it.

The change afterwards came slow. They didn’t exactly soften to him – the weird sisters didn’t do soft – but their attitude changed in minuscule little ways. Gradual enough he didn’t realise how much things had shifted between them until he found himself tangled up with them, post-coitally exhausted, and Prudence asked him for ideas on how to impress Blackwood with a spell the headmaster wouldn’t try to undercut for them.

He didn’t quite know what to do with himself when he started being allowed to sit in on them communing, hearing them chat amongst themselves – although more often than not it only made half sense when they jumped back and forth between speaking out loud and mind to mind.

He had gotten so used to being shut out of their little world that all of a sudden being admitted again was jarring.

Especially after Prudence had seemed to so determined to keep him locked out when they’d finished up Lupercalia together. The expression on her face had frosted over as they’d shrugged back into their clothes, a startling change after all the passion she’d poured over him throughout the night, over and over again.

Of course, Nick wasn’t sure what he had thought would happen afterwards either, not having thought much further than teasing the next moan from Prudence. Although being rebuffed was pretty low on the list if was honest with himself; Nick didn’t have to work to make people want him. That always happened naturally.

Prudence though, brushed off his offers of sex like swatting away flies, scoffed at the honeyed words he tried to drip in her ear, moved her hips out of range of his hands on the dancefloor.

When she dipped her shoulder to make his touch slid right off, eyes dark and unreadable, Nick huffed a sigh in defeat. He wasn’t stupid, and told himself that her scorn didn’t smart. Besides there was a whole gaggle of guys and girls who were more than willing to help him forget the sound of Prudence’s ragged laughter when he had gone cross eyed with pleasure below her.

And then he matched up with Agatha for the next Lupercalia.

He didn’t have to offer up anything to Agatha at all. She demanded it all on her own, and kept demanding when they left the woods.

After Prudence’s insistent indifference, Agatha’s greediness was startling, but not something Nick had any difficulty with. He was used to giving himself up to magic, to touch, to praise; giving himself up to Agatha’s desire was the easiest thing in the world to do.

Especially considering what he knew would happen if he and Agatha kept at it. Everyone at the academy knew what getting one sister usually meant getting all three of them, that was just how they worked. Yet as one hookup became three and then five, there was no Dorcas. And no Prudence either.

Despite the fact that he knew that Prudence was well aware of what was going on between him and Agatha. She had caught them stumbling out of an empty classroom the third time they’d hooked up, looking them over with obvious exasperation, but the reaction Nick had expected didn’t come, and him and Agatha once again went at it alone.

“You’re distracted, Nicky,” Agatha panted, expression caught halfway between reproach and amusement as she looked down at him. “If I didn’t like my sisters so much, I’d probably be offended at how much you’re thinking about them while you’re inside me.”

Nick flinched at being caught out like that. He had never quite learned to predict when the sisters would look in on his thoughts, and certainly wasn’t used to it happening while he was busy going to town on Agatha. Or at least he thought he wasn’t.

Snarling, Nick yanked at her hair in punishment to dull the ugly lurch of nausea in his gut at the feel of Agatha prying into his head. She moaned, then laughed as Nick bit her shoulder in retaliation, the sound echoing in his ear when they both came to their shuddering end.

“So why don’t you invite your sisters along?” Nick asked afterwards, as he lay spread eagle and shivery on the bed, deciding to push past the discomfort of addressing it now that Agatha had brought the subject up herself.

“You know we don’t fuck _all_ the same people, right?” She remarked, trying to get her braids back under control after Nick had tugged them loose.

“Yeah, but I have it on good authority that I’m a lot of fun to share,” he drawled, winking when she looked at him over her shoulder, her expression filthy enough to match his own.

“Prudence’s right about you, you really are a shameless hussy, aren’t you?”

“And you three are all so judgmental,” Nick said with a long-suffering sigh, shrugging off the barbed remark, and scooted closer to her, pushing her hands off her hair. “Let me help you with those.”

Agatha let him, moving the half done braid over her shoulder to let Nick finish the job like she sometimes had made him do when they were little kids.

“I’m working on it, Nicky,” she said as he finished up, giving him a thorough kiss with a harsh bite to his lower lip as if for good measure before slipping out of the room.

There was no Prudence either when Agatha grabbed a hold of him the next time, Nick warm and flushed from the drinks at the party she dragged him away from, but Dorcas was already waiting on the bed in the room she took him to.

As Agatha pushed him down onto the sheets, Dorcas stripped out of her clothes, long coppery hair licking at her breasts like flames as she joined them. Dorcas let him pin her down and spread her legs with such wanton eagerness that Nick couldn’t help but falter, breath coming harsh and heavy as he stared down at her.

The hunger in Dorcas’ eyes was a little unsettling, but Agatha was impatient to get them going, tugging hard on his hair to urge him on until Nick moaned and instinctually obeyed the wordless order to continue to kiss his way down her sister’s body to the warm, soft heat of her cunt.

He wasn’t altogether surprised when Prudence came striding up to him a few days later, pushing his books out of the way and sat down on the desk in front of him.

“What is the angle you’re working here?”

“Excuse me. Your ass is on my essay,” he scolded, tugging a little on the paper she’d settled on to illustrate his point.

“My ass is all over your business.”

“If only that was the case, Pru,” Nick grinned, but Prudence didn’t laugh with him, her eyes speculative as she stared him down.

“I’m sleeping with Agatha and Dorcas, didn’t know that was a crime,” he said with a shrug as he gave up on freeing his essay.

“Should be with the way they’re nagging me to join. I’m sick of Dorcas badgering me with memories of your red face all the time,” she snapped, using her foot to push him further back into his chair and Nick’s heart started to race.

“Well I’m glad I made an impression, put a lot of effort into making her happy,” he said, impressing himself with how much cocky arrogance he was able to put into his words when he could feel the pounding of his pulse in his throat. “Your sisters aren’t the only ones who want you to join, you know. You’re more than welcome.”

“And why would I want to join,” she said with enough bite that Nick had to repress a flinch.

Her viciousness had begun to feel more pointed in recent months, and Nick didn’t understand why, his own ability to read her tested harder than it had been in years.

“Well, just imagine it. The academy’s golden boy and the weird sisters, the legendary three in one, all together,” Nick said, aiming towards her most obvious weak spot, closely watching her striking, sharp boned face as he spoke. “It’s quite a picture, I assure you.”

“And I’m sure you’ve imagined it.”

“All the time,” Nick admitted, shrugging through the pounding of his heart. “All that power, all the great sex. Both at the same time if we want to get more specific.”

“And what kind of sex spells did you have in mind?” She quizzed, and Nick strangled a grin at the interest that she wasn’t entirely successful in hiding.

“I’ve always wanted to do the storm chaser. I imagine the four of us could conjure the mother of all storms.”

“If you can keep it up for long enough,” Prudence remarked, but Nick was confident enough in his own abilities in that department that he easily shook of that particular insult.

“There’s nothing wrong with my stamina, Pru. You know that. As I recall I got you off five times during Lupercalia.”

She frowned at him, pushing herself off his desk again. Nick bit his tongue hard to stop himself from trying to make another bid for her attention, annoyed at the insistent, itchy desire to impress her. He’d rather be catapulted into heaven than beg.

He jerked in his seat when Prudence slipped two fingers under his chin, forcing him to look up at her again.

“It was six times actually,” she said, giving his chin a little chuck as a way of goodbye before slipping away again.

He wished he knew what cast the deciding vote in the end. If his attempt to appeal to her desire for power had done the trick or if it was Dorcas apparently thinking very horny thoughts about him was what had moved the needle in his favour.

Whatever the reason though, all of a sudden she was there the next time he got into bed with her sisters. Staring down at him with something not quite warm and fierce in her eyes when she tugged on the buttons on her dress.

“Pru,” he said, voice rough as his hand left Dorcas’ breast, reaching for her.

“You’re a mess, Nicky,” she cooed, kicking of her shoes before taking his hand, stroking her fingers across the veins in his forearm.

Dorcas and Agatha seceded their spots to make room for their sister, coiled tight as if waiting for her lead as she climbed on top of Nick.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” she muttered as she grabbed a hold of his jaw, nails biting into his cheeks as she stared down at him.

“Just shut up and kiss me,” Nick goaded, lips parting when her eyes narrowed and she leaned down to do just that, mouth warm and demanding against his.

He heard Dorcas and Agatha giggle, their hands joining in to crawl all over him as Prudence’s held him still for the kiss. Nick submitted to it all with a sigh against her tongue, a feeling not unlike relief washing over him even as the sisters began winding him up.

Nick had had girlfriends and boyfriends before, but being involved with the sisters were unlike any liaison he’d been a part of. Would have been different even without the storm conjuring and the way the rest of the academy gossiped about them.

He’d never tried being a kept man before.

Their appetites kind of made him one by default – boundless and creative enough that Nick had little time or energy to contemplate engaging with any other lover, and with the sisters having staked such an obvious claim to his attention, most of the offers disappeared anyways.

No one wanted to get on their bad side, but Nick heard more than a few of the teachers and other students muttering that Nick must have lost his mind to settle in with a gaggle of Night-sisters, no matter how powerful they were together.

The academy rumour mill was well known to him at this point though. Nick knew that all his relationship with the sisters would end up doing was make him more notorious and annoy Blackwood. Neither which seemed like a negative in Nick’s mind.

And in the meantime, he got to exhaust himself between their spread thighs and lay close to them as the four of them fought to regain their breath afterwards. The half coherent conversations spoken across naked flesh filled him with unfamiliar, soft sort of triumph, even if their talk was never about soft subjects.

One time Dorcas even started making teeny, tiny braids in his hair after a particularly exhausting bout between the sheets. Prudence and Agatha mocked her so relentlessly for it that Dorcas regressed back to stuttering as she tried to explain away such aberrant behaviour.

Nick laughed about too as he tugged the little braids loose, but didn’t go as hard on her as the others did – he could sympathize having done his share of silly stuff after being all fucked out too.

However when he slipped from the bed, he gave her a playful little pinch that made her squirm and then her face did something funny as she looked at him. A strange, tremulous expression that Nick had never seen on her before, and one that quickly faded when he frowned at her, trying to figure out what it meant.

He wasn’t good at guessing Dorcas’ moods though, more used to thinking of her as part of a whole rather than her own person. She had always been the sister he had spent the least time with, his preference for Prudence a well-established, but unspoken fact between the four of them.

It wasn’t until the midsummer night’s celebration that he realized just how differently she looked at him.

There was none of Agatha’s savage amusement or Prudence’s mocking camaraderie as she cornered him while the flames were catching through the great bonfire, flowers dripping from her loose hair that shone like fresh minted copper in the firelight.

“Dorcas…”

He’d barely shrugged out of his clothes as she backed him away from the rest of the coven, and Nick managed to catch a glimpse of what looked like frustration in her blue eyes before the shadows obscured her face.

Her hand was already in his boxers, and Nick had a faint, offhand realization he hadn’t had sex with Dorcas one of one before as she worked his dick hard with the self-assuredness of someone who none the less had intimate knowledge of all his pleasure spots.

“You want me,” she whispered before her mouth pressed hot against his, and Nick groaned, reaching down to wrap his fingers around hers, urge her into a rhythm faster and harder than the teasing slide of her hand she was using, but she resisted.

“You want me,” she repeated, voice husky and eager. “Say it.”

His mouth opened reflexively, tongue forming the words before he’d put much thought to it, helplessly thrusting into her grip.

“You love having my hands on you, don’t you?”

“Love it,” he parroted, starting to shiver when Dorcas fingers tightened, thumb working against him in way that punched all remaining breath out of his chest. When he came it was with a gulping heave as he struggled to draw in breath.

Dorcas grabbed his hand, pushing it under her skirt and Nick shoved it into her panties, seeking out the heat he could feel rising off of her.

“You can have me, you want that, right?”

“Yes,” Nick mindlessly agreed, suddenly furious that he’d come so soon. Before he could fuck her.

Instead he rubbed his fingers against her hard and fast, Dorcas’ mouth glistening in the dim light and the noises spilling out of her sounded both vicious and vulnerable all at once.

When he’d finally licked his fingers clean at her urging, he felt a little unsteady on his feet, achy like he’d emerged from deep waters.

Dorcas seemed more than pleased though, her face flushed and soft with orgasm as she reached up to kiss him deep and heavy and Nick automatically followed her cue, trying to figure out what the prickling in the back of his head was telling him.

Prudence and Agatha’s laughter interrupted them before he could find an answer, stumbling half-dressed into their little patch of the woods and scolding him and Dorcas for making a start without them.

Dorcas’s blissed out expression became guarded all at once.

“The dancing is about to start,” Prudence said, eyes narrowing as she looked them over before taking Dorcas’ hand, something passing unspoken between the two girls as she dragged her off.

He danced, he laughed, the ritual wine making him giddy and light headed until he tumbled naked onto his back in the flower field alongside all three sisters, not entirely sure which girl he was kissing as he closed his eyes and leaned into it. All strangeness from earlier in the night put to rest.

When he felt the odd, niggling sensation in the back of his mind again more than a week later, it too happened when it was hard to focus. The harsh working of Dorcas’ hips against his made it difficult enough, but was Agatha’s voice that made it impossible.

He couldn’t understand what she was saying, the words slippery like oil, although the intention was obviously filthy judging by how much her breathy whisper was turning him on. And yet, he senselessly struggled against the urge to come without knowing why as Dorcas claimed her orgasm with a loud moan, and Agatha’s mocking chuckle echoed in his ear before she bit down on his shoulder and Nick whimpered, dangling on the precipe.

Prudence took pity on him, pushing Agatha and Dorcas out of the way as she set out to get him off with the heat of her mouth.

Nick’s hands scrambled across the soft fuzz of Prudence’s hair, but found no purchase, reaching down to grip onto her shoulder instead to brace against the pleasure washing over him. At least he did until she shrugged it off and pinned his wrist down along his side as he finally came apart.

Dorcas and Agatha were momentarily forgotten as he watched Prudence wipe her mouth with the back of her hand, dark eyes staring right into his. He wasn’t sure what it was in the way she stared at him, if it was the way she tongued at her bottom lip or the tilt of her head, but all of a sudden everything clicked into place.

“Get off me,” he insisted, stumbling from the bed, suddenly sick to his stomach and dodging out of the way of Agatha’s hands reaching for him.

He thought he’d gotten better at figuring out when they dipped into his head.

“I need to go,” he said, ignoring the puzzled frowns on Agatha and Dorcas’ faces, and wishing Prudence would stop staring at him with quite so much weight to her gaze as he struggled into his jeans.

Embarrassment warred with the sick feeling in his stomach as he staggered from the room in his haste to get away.

He should have known what was going on, should have put two and two together after Dorcas’s strange behaviour on midsummers eve. Afterall he was better familiar with the subtleties of their particular brand of cerebral focused magics than anyone else, and had never made a secret of his distaste on the rare occasions they used it on him. It had always just been the mind reading though, which was unpleasant enough, but nothing like the suggestion Dorcas and Agatha had put him under.

Or at least he thought it had always been just the mind reading. Perhaps it hadn’t been, maybe he’d just been struck dumb with his desire for them. For their vicious words and warm mouths. The gentle scrape of their nails through his hair. Because there was no way that Dorcas’ coaxing on midsummers eve or Agatha’s muttered manipulation the week after that had been the first time something like that had happened.

Trying to pinpoint when exactly their magics had mixed in with their play became like an obsession. One Nick picked at like a scab as he went over every recent encounter with them. Each filthy encouragement whispered into his ear, each potent stare.

But if there was a difference between his own desire and what the sisters had suggested he wanted, he couldn’t find it, even after tearing at what felt like very roots of his brain stem over and over again with a wanting misery that felt like lead in his guts.

And wanting them didn’t go away. Of course it didn’t. Wanting Prudence and her sisters by his side felt like an integral part of his character by now, but when he slithered back into bed with them – after seven days of frenzied, inward panic and too much absinthe at Dorian’s – every caress seemed to hold the promise of sharp teeth behind it. Teeth he knew all to well.

He didn’t linger afterwards, no regaining his breath gasping into the hollow of Prudence’s throat with Agatha panting against his shoulderblade and heat of Dorcas' thighs draped across his.

Even so he might have made it past it all, might have found a way to retaliate and made them think twice about planting suggestions in his head if it hadn’t been for Dorcas.

“You’re being very weird these days,” she complained as she found him curled up in one of the corners in the library he hadn’t frequented in years.

“Busy, there’s a difference,” Nick said, trying to make his voice as unwelcoming as possible.

Sometimes it was difficult to figure out if Dorcas was being willfully ignorant or just clueless. She barreled right past the implicit warning in his tone, settling down next to him, hand wandering across his chest like she owned him.

“What do you want, Dorcas?”

“Figured that was obvious,” she muttered, brushing the hair out of his face.

“Not in the mood right now,” he said, squirming under her touch. “Busy, like I said.”

“You’re always in the mood, Nicky.”

She moved the book in his lap out of the way, her hand taking its place, rubbing against the crotch of his jeans, laughter bubbling in her throat in a way that usually got him all shivery.

“Not for you,” he said, pushing her hand away despite the heat flooding through him, and only felt the tiniest twinge of guilt when he saw her face go all rigid.

Her featured didn’t stay that way though, lips curling back from her teeth in a snarl, eyes narrowing at him as her breathing got all ragged with anger.

“You’re waiting for something that won’t happen,” Dorcas said, voice sharp. “Prudence smiling at you, telling you that you’re special as she strokes your hair. She’s never going to give you that.”

Nick reeled back and found nowhere to go with nothing but bookcases behind him. Dorcas words dredging up half formed thoughts and feelings that he’d buried so deep that he had convinced himself they had never been there at all.

“You’re speaking more nonsense than usual, Dorcas,” he said through suddenly numb lips.

“Right,” Dorcas laughed, apparently deciding not to dignify that with an answer. “And what if I told you that I won’t mind. I could say those things to you if you want to hear them.”

The anger in her voice had faded, words tight as she reached out to stroke her fingers through his hair, and Nick flinched away.

“Don’t need that,” he said, pushing her away to get to his feet, going against his better instincts to hastily retreat, the threat of humiliation hanging over his head like a scythe waiting to drop.

He yanked the books into his arms, forcing himself to look at Dorcas who didn’t seem as furious like he had thought she would be. Something sharp and jagged in the way she stared at him instead.

“Don’t know what you think you know, but I don’t want that,” he insisted.

He didn’t trust Dorcas to keep things to herself. Even if she hadn’t looked vengeful as she had stared as him, Nick knew her well enough to know that it would likely come.

He had never actually read up a lot on cerebral magics – it wasn’t a field of magic where his skillset was strongest and his understanding of that particular branch of magic had always felt so instinctual due to how much time he spent with the sisters. But the books where there, the spells were there to keep them out if he wanted.

He had never thought he’d need to defend himself in that manner against the girls. He had never had to before.

More fool him.

When Prudence cornered him in the end, everything screaming that she wanted answers, he was ready. Or at least more ready than he had been in a long time.

“Why are you acting so strange?” she asked, catching hold of his arm as he came in from the forest – the only place he trusted to hide him while studying these days. “You’re not being your usual dumb slut self.”

“I’ve been busy,” he said with a shrug, for a moment desperate to be able to read minds himself, needing to know if Dorcas had been gossiping about their conversation.

“Yeah, busy avoiding us,” Prudence huffed, and Nick allowed himself to be marched off into a more secluded hallway than the main entrance when he could see that they’d already attracted more than a few curious looks.

“I mean, it’s not like I care, but what’s with the stick up your ass all of sudden? Not the usual kind of thing you like to put up there,” she continued, and Nick almost let out a bark of laughter, the bite of humour unexpected.

“I have other stuff to do than just the three of you,” he said with a shrug, feigning nonchalance as he tried to remember the steps to the spell, he had been training for more than a week, the wards slowly humming to life in his head.

“This is about the invocation that Agatha used on you, wasn’t it?”

For a moment he thought he’d failed with his own spell, before realizing that Prudence just knew him better than anyone else did. He grimaced, resentment spilling over and bursting from his mouth with a venom that took him aback just as much as it seemed to surprise Prudence, her eyes widening as he snapped at her.

“I don’t see why you think you need to do shit like that. Not like I haven’t been at your beck and call for months now.”

“It’s just some sex suggestion spells, we use them all the time. No one ever complains,” Prudence said, eyes rolling and her tone going just as cold as his was hot. “You’ve never complained before.”

“Yeah well, I am now,” he spat back.

He felt it then. A probing of Prudence’s magics, the warding he’d thrown up making it feel much like the persistent poke of a finger against his temple. Nick grimaced, sending more force into the mental shield, slamming the proverbial shutters on her so hard that she flinched with it, before glaring at him in obvious distaste of his rudeness.

“Very mature, Nicky. That’s the way you’re going to do this?”

“What? Pissed that I’m saying no to you for once?” he said, weak kneed with relief at being able to keep her out. She wouldn’t get to see the awful, embarrassing boil of feelings that Dorcas’ words had forced him to work hard to shove the lid back onto.

“You never say no, Nick,” Prudence scoffed. “Not to anything.”

“I don’t like people messing with my head,” Nick bit back as way of answer.

His cheeks burned with just as much embarrassment as anger, painfully aware that he was losing his grip on himself in a way he hadn’t in years despite the bars he had assembled in his head.

“We don’t actually make you do stuff, you don’t already want to do,” Prudence insisted, brows pulled together in a heavy frown, mouth pursed with annoyance as she took a few steps back to look him over.

“That’s not the point,” Nick hissed, but not seeing any signs that he as getting through to her. If anything, her expression just hardened even more.

“It’s who we are.”

Her voice had gone dangerously quiet, the frosty tone turning into blade sharp edge that made Nick’s jaw tense up as he started back at her.

“So that’s how it is going to be?” she said after a moment of silence, Nick not knowing how to respond. She wasn’t wrong, they’d been born with those powers after all. Mind control was natural to them.

The bottom dropped out of Nick’s stomach as he realized the precipice he was standing at, and yet he couldn’t back down. The distance he’d worked so hard to eliminate between them when he’d finally gotten her into bed with him and her sisters rapidly growing – Nick could feel it widening as they stared at each other.

“Seems that way,” he muttered after a several long moments of self flagellation.

“Well, fuck you then,” Prudence snapped and gave him a hard shove as she pushed past him.

The anger sputtered out as he watched her leave, fists clenched at her sides. Lead heavy misery took its place, but Nick grit his teeth as he stomped in the opposite direction.

He’d done just fine without the sisters when they’d been too caught up in each other to pay attention to him. He would do fine without them now. More than fine.

No sisters, no Amalia. No one he had to waste time trying to make happy.

Just the way it was supposed to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, just in case there's any doubt about this, I'm not knocking polyamorous relationships with this chapter. I think they're feasible if all parties goes into it openly and honestly. Which no one does in this case. 
> 
> Except maybe Agatha. She just came to have a good time and everyone else made it way too dramatic.
> 
> Next week, the Academy gets a new student. A certain blonde, head band wearing student.
> 
> Oh, and I'm on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unseemingowl) too, come and say hi :)


	10. Spellman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another one of the lighter chapters, because here comes Sabrina Spellman, the biggest scandal to hit the Academy of Unseen Arts in years. Nick is fascinated and Prudence is annoyed.

Sabrina Spellman was tiny for a girl to cause so much trouble. It was a little anti climatic. Considering her heritage and the scandal she had made out of her dark baptism, Nick had expected an amazon, tall and fiery, or someone similar to the sisters, murder in her steps. Anything but the sweet faced little blonde who marched into the choir room next to Blackwood.

Taking in her neat black headband and prim little cardigan, it was hard to imagine her as the – in Blackwood’s pompous words – shameless Eve who had made the entire coven chase after her in the woods after doing the unthinkable and rejecting the opportunity to sign her name in the Dark Lord’s book.

But then she started singing.

There it was.

Barely a wobble in her sweet voice, dark eyes shooting off challenges left and right when she looked up at them as the final sweet note rang out of her delicate little throat. Perhaps seeming a little uncomfortable under the intense scrutiny of the entire choir, but not looking the least bit cowed. Plenty of guts for sure.

Hearing Lady Blackwood’s dig at Prudence’s expense, he shot a quick look in her direction and winced inwardly. The murderousness on Prudence’s face was obvious, but the Spellman girl simply smiled at her of all things.

Bold as hell itself. He swallowed back a grin. Or possibly extremely reckless.

Not for the first time he kicked himself for having been out of town for her baptism – just his luck that the biggest scandal the academy had gone through in years went down when he was away. Judging from the scandalized whispers and the way Blackwood had stomped around like an angry bullfrog in the days after, it had been a sight to behold.

Looking at her now, fearlessly taking her space in the choir line up next to Prudence, Nick would have given his right arm to see her defying the coven in the woods - and in the desecrated church after she had somehow convinced Daniel Webster to come out of hiding.

It was hard, impossible really, not to be intrigued by such a conflicting package of a person, although he seemed to be the only one with that mindset. Even in the midst of singing, the choir seemed more preoccupied with squinting at her than hitting their cue – it had been a long time since the infernal choir had been so out of tune.

Of course Nick had probably been the only one of them who had gone into their first meeting with Sabrina Spellman with the expectation of being at least a little charmed by someone who had made her way into the academy with such outrageousness. He could relate, after all the last arrival that had been half that outrageous had been his own about ten years before.

From his position at the back of the choir Nick had an excellent vantage point to take in the swish of her blonde hair as she bopped her head in time with the music – the bit of her neck he could see over the high cut of her collar looking very alluring. Such fair skin, would probably blush up a storm like Dorcas did if he pressed his lips there.

Petites weren’t usually his thing, he liked a little more heft to his partners, but with fire like that in her eyes, he imagined Sabrina would be able to give as good as she got. An altogether tempting idea.

When his gaze skittered away from Sabrina’s delicate little neck, he caught Prudence looking at him. Her mouth curved in such obvious distaste that she had no doubt guessed the nature of his thoughts. He took a cue out of Sabrina Spellman’s book and simply smiled at her, which only seemed to incense her further, and Nick suppressed a grin.

Unsurprisingly Sabrina was sitting by herself in the dining hall when Nick had fetched his own lunch, picking at the food, which seemed the sensible reaction. Lunch was never great the academy, just like dinner and breakfast weren’t either.

From the way her shoulders hunched a little, Nick guessed that she could no doubt feel the weight of all the staring, his own included. He hesitated for a second, before deciding to head over in her direction. Now that he’d gotten over the initial lustful lurch to his guts in the choir room, his mind settled back on his original interest in her, her heritage.

She could of course not have been more than a few months old when her father had died, but the Spellman household had to be full of memories and trivia about the man.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Sure,” she seemed surprised most of all that someone was even speaking to her, eyes a little wide as he settled down, but readily enough angling her body towards him as he started talking.

For the first time in all his time at the academy he had found someone who was as eager on the subject of Edward Spellman as he himself was. The knowledge was a little jarring, made him lurch forward in his speech more than he usually did at a first meeting, and Nick had to force himself to reel back a little as he tried to get a feel for what made the blonde Spellman tick.

Not that they got to talk long. The sisters’ arrival was predictable, but none the less unwelcome, and Nick swallowed back a sour grimace when they sashayed up. Sabrina – either blind or willfully ignoring the viciousness in their eyes – invited them to sit down before Nick could say anything.

A little more reckless than ballsy perhaps? Or maybe the danger in the eyes of the sisters were just not as obvious to Sabrina as it was to him.

Prudence certainly didn’t make much of an attempt at pleasantry or small talk before digging in.

“We heard that you didn’t want to take your dark baptism because you’re in love with some mortal boy. Must be some Spellman kink, hmm? Slumming with mortals,” she said, smile razor sharp, eyes darkly glittering. “Like father like daughter, right?”

Sabrina’s hesitant friendliness deflated, but she didn’t seem faced by Prudence’s words, more exasperated than anything, sending an insincere smile in the sisters’ direction.

The info on a mortal boyfriend was new though. He thought he’d heard all that the rumour mill had ground out about Sabrina Spellman’s dark baptism, even the preposterous stories that she had brought holy water to the baptism and sprayed Blackwood in the face with it before running off.

“Careful, Nicky. Or she’ll cocktease you the way she did the Dark Lord,” Prudence continued, Agatha and Dorcas smirking conspiratorially on either side of her.

“Why do you have to be such a bitch all the time, Pru?” he said, donning the same smily meanness she liked using.

“I don’t know, Nicky. Why do you have to be such a warlock slut all the time?”

She had to be uncommonly riled, or she wouldn’t have been caught being so unsubtle. If it hadn’t been so annoying, it would have made him laugh, her attempt at sabotage so very obvious.

It wasn’t the first time she had made an attempt to trip him up while he was trying to move in on a prospective lover. The sisters had liked to do that even before he’d started hooking up with them. Just to annoy him. He’d come to see it as a challenge, a sort of game – in the months after his breakup with them though, it was as if they couldn’t quite find their way back to the old rhythm of it anymore.

And Prudence didn't normally look at him in the way she did now when he pushed back. So furious he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tried to hex him. Somehow Sabrina Spellman had really managed to push her buttons.

Rather than indulge Prudence’s fury, he turned to Sabrina and invited her to leave with him.

“I’m not the only one they’re bitchy towards then?” Sabrina asked, breaking the silence as they departed the dining hall under the combined weight of the stares from the rest of the students.

“On no, you’re nothing special on that front. They live on a steady diet of bitchiness,” he said, leading her past the statue of Baphomet, liking her quick flash of laughter at that comment.

“If you don’t mind my saying, you don’t look much like your father. I’m guessing you take after your mother in that department?” he said, conversationally, folding his arms behind his back.

“You study my father’s photographs too?”

“Not quite that big of an admirer,” Nick said with a laugh. “But his portrait hangs in the gallery, kind of hard to miss.”

“Do we have time to see it before the next class?” she asked, fresh eagerness in her voice, much like when he’d told her about reading her father’s journals.

“Sure thing, it’s this way.”

“I’m a carbon copy of my mom. Except my eye colour,” Sabrina admitted as they headed up the stairs, and reached up to touch her nose. “And well, the nose. This a proper Spellman clan snout.”

“You know, I see what you mean,” he said as they reached the portrait, the former high priest looking at them from above a nose very similar to his daughter’s. Nick couldn’t help but wonder if the nose and the rebelliousness Edward Spellman had obviously passed onto his daughter came with as big a dose of his brilliance. “Yours is cuter though.”

He could feel her sidelong glance, and half turned to see a decidedly skeptical look on her face. Was not going to be an easy victory then. Nick could work with that, might even make it more fun, it had been a long while since he’d last had to work for it.

“It’s funny,” he said, abandoning the flirtatiousness for a moment. “I’ve read so many of his texts and seen his pictures so many times that I almost feel like I know him.”

“You probably know him better than I do,” Sabrina said with a shrug, a melancholy expression on her face. “Not that many texts of his in the Spellman house. All of it went to the academy, so I just have the family photos and the anecdotes from my aunts and cousin to rely on.”

“I see,” Nick said, stumped by her honesty. She was the kind of orphan who spoke about her parents, unheard of amongst the academy orphans – the only person who he’d ever talked extensively about his parents with was Prudence. And it had been years since the last time. “That’s too bad,” he finally muttered, inwardly grimacing at how redundant that sounded.

“Yeah, so can’t help you much in ways of stories about him,” Sabrina said, looking over at him, and evidently seeing the awkwardness in his expression, because her shoulders tensed up.

“Enough about my dad,” Sabrina said, visibly making an effort to pack the melancholia away, as if embarrassed by her expression of emotion. “Your parents must be proud if you’re an advanced student. They live around here?”

He almost laughed, terrible way to changing the subject, although she of course had no way of knowing that.

“Wouldn’t know. They’re dead like yours,” Nick said with a shrug, keeping his voice as neutral as possible.

“Oh,” the affable smile vanished from her face, and something altogether more unsettling made its way into her eyes. It looked like softness. He realized that Sabrina Spellman might be the kind of person who would want to ask him more about them.

“So I know all the secret places around here,” he hastened, voice dropping into the low, warm timbre he used when flirting, conspiratorially leaning closer. “In case you need somewhere quiet where you wont get interrupted.

That Spellman-nose of hers did a kind of cute little scrunch, and he was pretty sure her cheeks were flushing as the glominess finally evaporated, a new sharpness taking over her gaze.

“I’ll keep that in mind," she said, tone light, but with a hint of bite behind it. “Might come in handy if I need a quick getaway.”

“Got yourself a deal, Spellman,” he said, chuckling in appreciation of the elegance of the rejection.

To be honest, he wasn’t entirely sure Sabrina Spellman wasn’t at least a little bit mad. Of course the immersion and harrowing could mess with even the sanest of heads, but it took a special kind of recklessness to ask a complete stranger to help her break into the library’s sanctum.

Even if Nick was the one who had already offered to show her the hidden corners of the academy.

What was even weirder was that he was kind of tempted to do it. Even as he was busy denying her request, he found himself trying to justify why he was saying no. Instead of leaving it at the simple, resounding ‘no’ he was supposed to throw back at her.

There was just something about that bold faced conviction that was attractive in all its simplicity. That had to be it, especially when it came in such a very cute package.

He still wasn’t sure what her deal was by the time that Prudence found him in his usual secluded corner of the library on Sunday afternoon, trying to focus on the book of old norse conjuration circles that Blackwood had allowed him a peek at instead of thinking of Sabrina Spellman’s antics.

“What is it about Sabrina Spellman that’s got everyone tying themselves in knots. It’s exhausting,” she sneered, settling down on the chair next to him without waiting for an invitation.

“Aren’t you one of them? Seems to me like you’ve spent all weekend preoccupied with her,” Nick remarked, flicking to a fresh page and frowning down at the script.

“Waste of fucking time,” Prudence hissed. “Little mutt is determined to go against every rule we have. No disciplining that bitch without using way more drastic methods. Like killing her”

“Well, seems like she’s got the power to back it up,” Nick remarked with a chuckle, and felt Prudence jerkily tense up next to him. “I mean, rumour has it that she managed to wipe the floor with all three of you.”

Out of the corner of his eye he could see her clench her hand into a fist, and cycled through a selection of defensive spells in case he managed to get her to lose her temper. She seemed more wound up than usual, but of course, most people would probably be a little on edge if they’d somehow been bested by a freshman student. Nick had caused his own share of those reactions in the months after his baptism.

“And I see you didn’t manage to fuck her, Nicky,” Prudence remarked, fingers relaxing into a claw rather than a clenched fist. “Though not for lack of trying judging from the way you’ve been following her around like a little lap dog.”

“She’s interesting,” Nick said with a shrug, refusing to pounce at the metaphorical red cloth she was waving at him to draw a reaction.

“Sure, she’s interesting,” Prudence drawled, and Nick could hear the air quotes in her voice even if he didn’t bother to look at her. “Is it the Spellman thing? Or perhaps the thrill of trying to break her in before that mortal boy of her does?”

”Jealousy isn’t a good look on you, Prudence. Makes your mouth look all small.”

For a moment she was silent, but Nick’s concentration didn’t return to the book, bracing for Prudence’s next swipe instead.

”It’s not like she’s going to look your way, you know,” Prudence began, cat soft, “She’s got that goofy mortal boy up on a pedestal. It’s exhausting looking into her head, he’s practically all she thinks about.”

“Why do you care anyway? We broke up remember? It’s not your business if I want to hook up with her or not,” Nick said, trying to deflect her barbs, but there was enough truth in what she was saying to rankle him.

“Don’t flatter yourself, It’s about respect.” Prudence said, sighing, much as she had done when she had to explain to him how things at the academy worked when he had first arrived years ago. “She has no respect for any of our traditions, but I guess that isn’t too surprising. Too much mortal in her, not enough witch. Inevitable she would be a nuisance.”

The words were unfamiliar enough coming from her that Nick finally looked up at Prudence’s smirking face.

A healthy dose of despise for mortals were on par for witches and warlocks – it was hard to avoid despairing when they were all so dense as they plodded through life – but Prudence sounded positively sanctimonious as she spoke.

He wasn’t arrogant to think that the weird sisters’ dislike of Sabrina Spellman only stemmed from the fact that he was taking an interest in her, but surely things hadn't changed that much in the few months since he had broken off their liaison. It couldn't have. 

The sisters had of course started running more of the high priest’s errands since Nick had stopped distracting them. He had noticed that much, although he had tried not to pay too much attention to what they did for his own sanity’s sake.

“Swallowing the tenets wholesale now, huh?” he asked, keeping his tone light, cautious, but the smug smile still faded from Prudence’s face, head cocking to the side as the focus of her gaze sharpened.

Perhaps he gave Blackwood too little credit. The man did have his persuasive moments, Nick had been tempted to step into the inner circle more than once himself, but the idea of Prudence stepping into the shadow of the man who had ruthlessly put down her and her sisters for so many years felt all wrong.

“That’s how they’re meant to be eaten, you’re the one who thinks you can treat it as a pick and choose buffet,” she hissed as her eyes narrowed, lips pursing in a grimace that was not at all pleasant. “Well, you and your little half-breed crush.”

“The half-breed stuff is already getting old,” he said, matching the razor sharp edge to her words. “You’re going to start rattling off that witches are lesser than warlocks next? That Night children are only fit for the gutter?”

She was out of her chair so fast that Nick didn’t get his blocking up in time, hand caught half raised to defend himself when Prudence grabbed a hold of his jaw, forcing his head back as she got onto his lap.

For a second, neither of them spoke, tension humming, and then Prudence bit his lip hard enough to make Nick gasp, and took advantage of the situation to shove her tongue into his mouth.

It didn’t feel so much a kiss as a battle, but Nick still groaned, tasting his own blood in Prudence’s mouth as he leaned into it, paying her back in kind, head reeling at the sudden change in mood. They hadn’t so much as touched since they broke off, and the feel and taste of her was like the first burn of absinthe.

She pulled back, and Nick was tense as a bow string, not quite sure if violence or pleasure was next, or perhaps a tantalising combination of the two. The dark shine of Prudence’s eyes gave nothing away.

The hand he’d impotently tried to defend himself with had dropped to her thigh, but Prudence grabbed a hold of it now, lifted it to wrap her lips around his index finger. Her already smeared lipstick smearing further still on his finger.

“Fuck,” he muttered, his hips jerking reflexively under her when she sucked harder before slowly pulling her mouth off his finger again with an obscene, wet pop.

“Don’t want to?” she asked, deliberately rolling her hips over his, and then all thoughts of power struggle and hypocrisy were gone from Nick’s head, brain too busy reminding him of just how good Prudence always felt when she was close to him. How much he’d missed the feel of her flesh under his hands.

He reached down to cup her ass in his hands, fingers digging in as he ground her down against him and made them both bite back moans in the hushed quiet of the library. There was no playfulness in her though, only high tier rage as she tugged hard on his hair.

“This doesn’t change anything, Pru,” he grunted, pushing her out of his lap in order to yank her tights down around her legs.

“I told you to stop fucking flattering yourself, Nicky,” she snapped back, biting down hard on his neck when she climbed back into his lap, hard enough to make him flinch and swear, but he still helped her with the buttons to his jeans when she tore his belt open.

Afterwards, Prudence was off of him immediately, movements still a little slurred with orgasm as she searched for her panties on the carpet beneath their feet. Both their breathing sounded way too loud in his ears, and Nick grimaced as he pulled his boxers and jeans back up.

When Prudence reached out to smooth her fingers through his messy hair, Nick nearly jumped out of his own skin. He looked up at her before he could stop himself, not at all sure of the expression on his face.

For a split second he thought he saw something almost anxious in her eyes, lips parting as if to speak, but then it was gone and her lips curled into a disdainful smile.

“Good luck with the mutt. If you don’t dawdle, I’m sure you’ll be able to catch her before she goes home,” she said, letting her thumb trace over his bruised lip and Nick could feel a fresh, angry flush rush to his cheeks.

“Fuck you, Pru.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she laughed, raising her hand for a delicate little finger wave as she turned on her heel and headed out.

Head reeling, he made one half hearted attempt to refocus on the book, but found the beautiful braided conjuration circles of the northmen blurred in front of his eyes in favour of Prudence’s angrily blissed out face.

Rising with a furious, muttered grumble, Nick collected his things and stomped off to the sanctum, bypassing Cassius without a greeting.

Placing the book back into its proper spot, he leaned his head against the shelves, trying to get himself under control again. No one got under his skin quite like Prudence did, even now. It was maddening. Focusing on each inhale and exhale, harsh and loud in the quiet of the sanctum, he felt the energy of the room start to work.

No place at the academy was the feel of magic as focused as in the sanctum, the sheer power contained in the volumes surrounding him almost like a hum in the air, and Nick’s breathing slowed as he let himself tune into the frequency.

As he cracked open his eyes again, his attention was drawn to the Spellman papers on the neighbouring shelf and his thoughts jumped to Sabrina Spellman’s outrageous request the day before. Thinking about Sabrina Spellman made his frustration with Prudence spring up all over again, or at least it did until he swallowed thickly and forced it down. 

He remembered the unfamiliar, sad look on her face as she spoke about not having read any of her father’s journals, the twist to the delicate pink of her mouth.

The urge to act hit him without warning, and before he could second guess it, he reached out to snatch the smallest of the journals, a simple black notebook, from the shelf.

Heart stuck in his throat, he marched out again, giving Cassius a half hearted farewell as he hoisted his bag higher onto his shoulder. Cassius didn’t even look up, but simply waved him away with a grumble, nose buried what appeared to be an illuminated, medieval manuscript. Nick still tensed the whole way out of the library, kept expecting the librarian to call him back – he’d never deceived the old man before.

But it was worth the anxiousness to see Sabrina Spellman’s entire face soften with gratitude as he handed the journal over, her fingers reverent as she traced them across the nondescript black cover.

When she turned up again a day later though, her smile was anything but sweet, more like triumphant when she set her bag down on the chair next to him.

“Hello Nicholas.”

“Nick,” he corrected, sitting back in his chair to look at her – she was practically bouncing on her feet in excitement. “What’s up, Spellman?”

She hesitated for a second, but then jammed her hand into her bag and pulled out something rattling and teal, placing it on the table in front of him.

For a second he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but then things slotted into place. The acheron.

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Nick muttered, reaching out to smooth his fingers over the uneven surface, and there was no doubt, he knew the feel of the material like the feel of his own skin.

“Turns out there was a sleep demon inside. So my father made it unbreakable for a reason,” Sabrina said.

“But how did you get it open?”

“The journal helped.”

“Shush,” Nick hastened, quickly looking around to see if anyone was nearby. No one was. Abandoning the acheron configuration, Nick lifted his hands to rub them across his face, feeling the hectic flush of excitement in his cheeks. “Okay, so let me get this straight, not only did you solve the acheron configuration. I assume you also managed to trap the demon again? Otherwise you wouldn’t be standing here.”

“Well, I got some help from my aunts and cousin, but yeah. We trapped it.”

She looked unbelievably smug, hands on her hips, and Nick was rather surprised to realise how well her sweet face lent itself to that sort of expression – Satan, he would let this girl absolutely wreck him.

“Show me,” he croaked, making room for her at the desk, “Show me where you found the solution.”

“That should stay a Spellman secret, shouldn't it?” She said, though not sounding too serious about it, more teasing and Nick leaned forward in his chair.

Too wired to respond in the same manner, he leaned forward and growled “you owe me,” at her instead.

Sabrina didn’t seem to take his insistence the wrong way, rather she laughed and settled down next to him as she brought out the journal to explain. Nick felt frustratingly dumb for not connecting the dots himself as she thumbed through the worn pages.

Grumbling a little he pulled the book from her hands, and Sabrina let it slip through her fingers without protest. As Nick folded and refolded the pages with trembling hands, it was only the smell of roses on Sabrina’s skin that kept him in his chair instead of launching himself towards the inner sanctum to see if Edward Spellman had used the same trick to hide messages in any of his other journals.

After a few moments he realized that Sabrina wasn’t just waiting for him to finish, she was staring at him. Very intently.

“Something on your mind?” he muttered, tracing his fingers over the bend in the pages with a self-disparaging grimace.

“You dating a vampire or something?”

“Huh?” Nick frowned, looking over at Sabrina to see her not staring at his face, but somewhere a little further down and all of a sudden, he realized he had forgotten to heal up the bruise from Prudence biting down on neck the afternoon before. And he was not wearing the turtleneck he had been when he’d said goodbye to Sabrina.

“Oh, you know,” he said with a shrug, once again feeling the hot ache of the bruise now that he focused on it. “Shaving,”

“You barely have beard to speak of,” Sabrina protested, and Nick just about held back a startled laugh at her cheek. “And those are teethmarks.”

“Are we playing a game of quiz 20 that I wasn’t made aware of, Spellman?”

For a second Sabrina frowned at him, but then her face lit up in understanding, only to immediately correct him, “It’s called 20 questions.”

“Right, 20 questions. So like mortals to be literal.”

They had moved closer to one another as they perused the journal, and he could see the moment Sabrina realized how intimate their position had become, faces close enough to share air. The shutters immediately came down on the bright, excited glimmer in her eyes and she shifted deeper into her chair, away from him.

“You’re right, I’m sorry. It’s not any of my business,” she muttered, and he was delighted to see her blush.

“You want to make it your business?” he asked, letting his attention drift down to her lips – her mouth were very pretty, all coral pink and sweet looking, and he wondered idly is she was similarly pink other places.

“I’m in a committed relationship,” Sabrina said, wresting the journal back from him and looked down at it as she began to thumb the pages again. Which was just as well, because Nick was having a hard time not letting a smug grin make its way onto his face at sound of her defensive formality.

“Well in that case, how about you tell me which sleep demon was trapped in the acheron. Might be able to give you some extra info on them.”

Prudence was full of shit. Sabrina Spellman did look in his direction, not quite the way he wanted her to yet, but there was potential.

And Nick knew how to be patient.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I skipped over as much of the familiar scenes as I could. Because 1, there's the show for that and 2, because I mostly just wanted to write this chapter for the scene with Prudence and the new scenes with Sabrina. 
> 
> Next chapter is another Satanic interlude, and after that it's time for some fun with cannibalism.
> 
> Also, you're more than welcome to come say hi to me on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unseemingowl) :)


	11. Interlude, Great Satan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

It is the heat that wakes him. Sweat is beading on his upper lip and pooling in his armpits by the time Nick blearily blinks awake to see the massive, horned figure at the foot of his bed. It is as though the Dark Lord has brought the fiery depths of hell itself with him. 

Nick's knees crack hard against the floor in his hurry to prostrate himself before Satan's cloven foot and his mouth and nose is filled by hot air rank with the smell of scorched hair and sulphur. 

And yet His voice is so soft, sweeter than any breathless lover’s whisper, and Nick shivers, revulsion and arousal warring for attention as the words wash over him. 

The order is not what Nick is expecting. A dark devotion is supposed to be a horror. That is all he’s ever been told, the sacrament only spoken of in the most hushed of whispers, but what the Dark Lord asks of him is no such thing. It is too easy. A request for the simple act of kindness and the most basic of seductions. To pursue a flash of blonde hair and pink lips that Nick is already much too preoccupied with. 

“Such a handsome boy, so clever,” the Dark Lord purrs after delivering his bidding, clawed hand stroking across his bared back, and Nick trembles like the plucked string of a violin when the fingers pause on the shoulder where he is already marked.

“You will never let me down, will you my beautiful boy?”

Nick shakes his head, and bends his neck further to let the Dark Lord run his fingers through his hair like he owns him. The is touch so violently tender that Nick’s heart feel ready to burst with terror and with love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I even manage to creep myself out a bit, y'know? 
> 
> As mentioned last time, we're digging into the cannibalism stuff next time. Fun!


	12. Queen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait. Got a year older, mostly working from home again, and a second wave of #metoo is sweeping my country and my field of work in particular right now. To say I've been distracted would be an understatement.
> 
>  **Additional trigger warning for this chapter**. I've warned of canon compliant violence and gore from the beginning, but given how much of this chapter pivots around acts of cannibalism, I feel I gotta flag that specifically. Just to be on the safe side. 
> 
> Because remember, kids, witches straight up eat people in the caos-verse. It's bonkers.

He had never met anyone who asked as many questions as Sabrina Spellman did. Everything was up for question with her. At first Nick figured it was just the aftereffects of beginning her tutelage at the academy, but time only seemed to embolden her, make her more eager to ask. About absolutely everything.

He heard her scoff at the books in the library, wordless. Outraged. From the place in the row behind her where he grabbed a place during the black masses, he heard the same mutter, not wordless and insolent, until her formidable red-haired aunt shushed her with a sharp pinch to her arm and a clenched-teeth whisper.

It was when she butted heads with their teachers that she was the most exciting to watch though. Nick was almost sad he was primarily doing independent study by this point, because seeing her verbal sparring with the high priest was glorious. He had never seen anyone rattle the dignified Faustus Blackwood the way that the bossy little Spellman did.

Even Prudence couldn’t manage to do that, but of course, she had always tried to impress him, Sabrina – he got the distinct impression – wanted nothing more than to take Blackwood down and dance on his grave. That undercurrent of viciousness under her perky, bright-eyed façade was almost unbearably appealing.

Her behaviour was such a contrast to how he operated; Nick had long since stopped questioning things out loud. Although it hadn’t always been like that, he remembered well enough that he used to drive his mother around the bend with them. Amalia had tempered that urge in the woods somewhat – questions she couldn’t answer earned him a snarl or in the worst-case scenario a cuff on the ear.

All of his questions had gone unanswered when he had first arrived at the academy too. At least for the most part. When he lost his temper and screamed, demanding to know why he couldn’t sleep under his bed or why he had to change his clothes or eat a certain way, he was shunted off into a room until it hurt to yell anymore and his fingers ached from pounding at the door.

By the time they trusted him to have the run of the place unsupervised, Nick had learned to turn his questions inward, observe and listen instead.

It hadn’t taken him long to figure out that Blackwood did not care for the way Nick’s parents had taught him about the Dark Lord and the place of witches and warlocks in the world. And the oily drip of the high priest’s argument was persuasive enough that for a good long while, he had felt off-kilter all the time, no longer sure of anything at all.

Books had become like anchors in the unfamiliarity. They were how he came to realise how little canonical evidence there was for Blackwood’s way of seeing things.

However, his lack of questions was, he figured, a big part of the reason why he kept getting ahead despite how he kept declining Blackwood’s invitations to join the Judas Society. Nick was pretty sure the high priest took his refusal for arrogance, and found that attitude entertaining if a little annoying. Pride was not exactly a transgression in the church of night.

Sabrina’s relentless combativeness was a long overdue reminder that Blackwood – for all his bluster – usually had no other argument for his orders than “it’s the Dark Lord’s will” or “that’s not how things are done in this coven.”

And it was a reminder of how much distrust Nick deep down held for the high priest. At least when he wasn’t distracted by the shiny books and magical artefacts that he dangled in front of him or busy lapping up the praise that Blackwood was so ready to give him.

In hindsight he wasn’t sure where his doubts about the church and about Blackwood had begun. If he had dragged it with him into the academy alongside the memories of his mother’s devoted instructions, or if it had come from seeing the hurt on the sisters’ face when Blackwood directed his dismissiveness at them. Sometimes it seemed as if it turned up from out of nowhere, like the tide coming in and revealing new rocks or dunes when it pulled back. 

He knew one place where it had broken wide open though. His first Feast of Feasts. Bloodshed was not uncommon amongst their traditions, and yet nothing could have prepared him for watching Millicent Jackson be dismembered by the coven.

He tried telling himself it was just like eating the raw deer and squirrels that Amalia had fed him in the forest, but there were tears in Shirley Jackson’s eyes before her face hardened and she partook in cutting up the body of her sister too. And the blood felt thicker on his tongue than any animal’s ever had.

Nick barely made it out of the church before the blood and the flesh came up again in violent heaves leaving him to shiver in horror as the remaining gore dribbled from his lips. It was the worst possible way he could have blasphemed the rite; throwing up the sacrificial flesh of their witch sister, waste her gift to the coven.

Humiliated and horrified at his own failure to participate, he buried the shameful evidence, blood and dirt caking under his nails as his eyes burned.

When he stumbled upon Edward Spellman’s thoughts on the festival almost a year after the first Feast of Feasts he had participated in, Nick felt a tight knot loosen in his chest.

Blackwood might have done his best to frame it as the Dark Lord’s will, but it had been banned for more than a decade under Edward Spellman’s rule without issue, and their master worked in centuries, not years. If witches were out of time, the Dark Lord certainly was.

He wasn’t fickle enough to change his mind so soon after Edward Spellman had bid it stop.

At least that was what Nick counted on, relying on Edward Spellman’s ability to make sense of things that stumped him. With the former high priest’s condemnation of the ritual running through his head, it was easy to resolve not to participate in the feast again.

The alternatives came readily enough in the years after. Inheritance business to take off, a magical experiment too important to leave alone for the night, a visit to Berlin to observe a famous German conjurer. Each dismissal coming with a casual wave of the hand.

And then Prudence was chosen and all the flippancy he had used when talking to Sabrina the morning of the ritual turned to ash on his tongue when he saw her waltz into the academy on Blackwood’s arm afterwards.

It didn’t make sense. Even as he saw Dorcas and Agatha following her and the high priest with matching looks of shocked delight, the image didn’t compute. The queen was always found amongst the respected families, the old blood, not amongst the dime a dozen bastard orphans of the church.

From the transcendent look of joy on Prudence’s face, it was easy to see that she considered it the honour that Blackwood always made it out to be. That she was thinking of what came after, not the high priest slitting her throat and laying her open to be consumed by all the people around her.

How could He be so jealous a master that he would take a witch into his arms and down to hell with him when she hadn’t even rounded out her first century? A baby still by witch standards.

For a wild, awful second Nick hated the Dark Lord so fiercely that he could barely breathe, the furious, sour bile bubbling up within him as Prudence disappeared down the next corridor over. Only for the feeling to plummet as he immediately realised how treacherous his feelings were – his shoulder itched as if his devil claw was reminding him of just how close he was toeing the line.

Why should the Dark Lord not admire and respect Prudence and want her with him? If any orphan were ever to rise above her station and enjoy the Dark Lord’s gifts, it would be Prudence with her perfect mean streak and ambition.

Unable to stand still, needing to do something, anything, he started down the corridor in time to see Blackwood deposit Prudence at her dorm, a gaggle of students crowding around the doorway as if hoping to be granted an audience with the queen of the feast.

“Get out of my fucking way,” he snapped at them, and they skittered in their haste to do so as Nick shut the door behind him.

Only as he took in the sisters faces, looking him over, he wasn’t sure what to say after all.

“Nicky, come to congratulate your queen?” Prudence asked, voice as light and airy as he’d ever heard it, reclining on her bed as if she was already sitting on the throne of skulls.

“Where are you off to?” He said, frowning as he took in Agatha and Dorcas packing up a bag of what he recognised as Prudence’s dresses and negligees.

“The Spellman house, got to be close to my shepherd for her to wait on me after all.”

“Sabrina,” Nick deduced from the wicked little smirk on Prudence’s mouth.

“None other.”

“You’re happy about this?” Nick all but shouted, the words bursting out before he could stop himself.

“About having Sabrina Spellman waiting on me hand and foot? Of course, it’s going to be hilarious,” she said, the last syllables trailing off into a malicious little laughter that Agatha and Dorcas echoed.

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Nick insisted, and Prudence’s eyes immediately narrowed.

“Just because you resent having to participate, doesn’t mean I have to. You know my feelings on this matter,” she huffed, obvious in her annoyance at his behaviour.

And he did know. While he’d spiralled with shame after his first attempt at the festival, Prudence, Agatha and Dorcas had gone in the completely opposite direction. Seeing nothing except the purest satanic fervour on their faces, Nick had swallowed back his question and his secret, trying to figure out how to get through the ritual the next year from their impassioned whispers of being taken into Baphomet’s arms and heart. Their prayers to be given that special honour.

With his devotion fresh in his mind, Nick could understand the desire to be close to the Dark Lord, have their master mutter in his ear, the loving touch of his hand, but…

“You really relish the thought of Melvin and Elspeth sucking on your bones?”

“Are you and your little half breed friend conspiring to ruin this feast of feasts for everyone? Have some fucking respect,” Dorcas snapped, directing her glare at Nicholas, her grip tight around a pair of Prudence’s stockings as if she was tempted to strangle him with them.

Nick opened his mouth to snap back at her, but was interrupted by Prudence who got to her feet with stone cold calm.

“That’s alright, Dorcas. I’m about to be embraced by the Dark Lord, if Nicky wants to do a bit of ineffectual yapping, let him.”

“No Night sister has ever been chosen as sacrifice, Pru,” Nick said, voice lowering as she got all up into his personal space. He wasn’t sure what point he was trying to make, and still he kept talking.

“I know, glorious isn’t it,” Prudence said, an uncharacteristically wide smile making its way onto her face. “To be the first one.”

There it was. Of course. He had never quite understood why she wanted it with such passion, but it made a terrible sort of sense. The weird sisters had held a reign of terror over the other orphans and students at the academy for years and had broken new ground in the fields of conjoined magics, and yet no matter how powerful they became, they were still trash to so many of their brethren.

“Raised above all other women,” he said, the words coming out a great deal less severe than they had sounded in his head – always ambitious to a fault, Prudence.

“Well, you do know how much I like being on top, Nicky,” she said, reaching out to grab his jaw and gave it a teasing little shake, enough of a bite from her nails to recognise the wordless order to stop talking about it.

“Do I ever,” he said, words disappearing in his sharp exhale.

Dorcas was right of course. He was being an asshole, and for what? It wasn’t like Prudence could say no now, not even if he managed to somehow convince her that being taken into the Dark Lord’s heart wasn’t as wonderful as staying alive. She was bound for hell, for Lucifer, and nothing he said or did would be able to change that.

All he could do was be happy for her. She would get to live out eternity by his gentle, clawed hand, listen to his voice forever.

Nick swallowed back his impotent agitation, and paddled back onto the safer ground that Prudence so obviously wanted them on. Prying her hand off his jaw, he pressed a kiss to her knuckles, following it with a bite of teeth. 

“How about you come join us later tonight? I’ve heard all kinds of rumours of Sabrina’s recluse cousin that Luke’s hooking up with. Who knows, we might even be able to persuade that little prude to join the fun.”

“Well, we’ve never liked Luke having anything to himself, have we?” Nick said, plastering a smile onto his face and sidestepped the question of Sabrina, which Prudence, judging from her subtle eye roll, for sure noticed.

“No, we have not. So are you in or what?”

"Can't deny the queen anything."

“That’s right,” Prudence grinned, sending her sisters a pleased smile above her shoulder before sashaying back to her bed. “Now get out, we need to plan stuff and the other students will want to gawk at me.”

Agatha grabbed a hold of his arm, and for a split second, Nick was sure he saw his own muddled emotions reflected back at him in her dark eyes.

“Off you go, Nicky,” she said and showed him out of the room before he could say anything else.

In hindsight it was embarrassing really. How none of them had realised what was going on before Sabrina launched her crusade against the whole feast of feasts institution. The stench of jealousy and vindictiveness was so rank when paying attention that it seemed as though Prudence’s true heritage should have been obvious. Even before everything had been forced out into the open. By a fucking truth cake of all things.

Nick had a hard time wrapping his head around it all as he got the play by play when he stumbled across Sabrina in the courtyard the night after the botched ceremony. Still rattled by what had seemed like progress and then not at all when sister Mildred slit her own throat in the most deranged bit of bloodshed the church had seen in all his time there.

But perhaps it made sense that it would take an outsider like Sabrina to see things as they were. Lady Blackwood had never been subtle in her contempt for Prudence and her sisters and she wasn’t the only one. So many of the teachers made no secret of how little they thought of them, and Nick had no doubt that plenty of the other students would have followed suit if the girls weren’t so scary when they were together.

And all in all, the plot made sense. He almost had to commend her for it. Get rid of the ring leader and soon Dorcas and Agatha would lose whatever power they had over the others, none of them quite as clever as Prudence were.

“And Blackwood just had to admit it, right then and there?” he asked, pulling himself from the swirl of his thoughts to climb onto the railing where Sabrina had settled.

“Yup,” Sabrina said, grin wide as she swung her legs about. “Should have seen his face too.”

“So Blackwood’s bastard, huh? Bit obvious all in all.”

“By that logic Agatha and Dorcas should be his as well, and they definitely aren’t, so don’t be too hard on your deductive skills,” she chuckled, cheeks pinking up in the chilly breeze coming in from the mountains.

An errant lock of hair had snuck free of her headband and blew into her face to curl around the corner of her mouth and Nick once again felt his attention drawn to the soft arch of her cupid’s bow. It was so delicately shaped he wondered if he would get better results working at her upper lip rather than her lower lip, as had always been the case with Prudence, when he would some day get to kiss her.

He had thought it would happen when she had stumbled across the orgy in Ambrose Spellman’s room. There had been more than enough interest on her pale little face when he’d scrambled out of the pile of passionately writhing bodies to offer himself up, and he for sure had been revved up and ready to go, keen to peel the girly, pink pyjamas off her skinny limbs.

And then she’d run off instead, leaving him to get dragged back into the pile and get acquainted with her cousin’s very sturdy shoulders and warm lips.

It was maddening. He wasn’t sure where he was going wrong, and Sabrina brushed off his advances with something that seemed a cross between outrage and amusement.

At first, he had figured she was just being coy – the challenge of it a fun novelty – but now, after practically offering himself up for her on a silver platter and already mostly naked for her convenience, Nick had come to the final conclusion that it ran much deeper than that.

Despite all those reluctantly curious glances he’d caught her sending in his direction, it seemed that the committal business with her mortal was more than just some fancy of a witch who couldn’t quite find her footing with the witch traditions. The devotion in that was rather startling. Intriguing. He’d never actually seen it done before; faithfulness looked very different in a witch couple than a mortal one.

“I feel a little bad for her to be honest,” Sabrina said after a while, interrupting Nick’s unproductive train of thought.

“Who? Prudence?”

“Yeah,” She sighed, and pulled her scarf up a bit higher against the nip of the cold. “She wanted it so much, and then she found out none of it was real.”

“You’re something else, Spellman,” he chuckled, hearing the incredulousness in his own voice. “Prudence has done nothing but to torment you since you got here, and yet you go around feeling sorry for her and stick out your neck for her.”

“It was really more about sticking it to Blackwood,” Sabrina said, brushing it off with a wry grin.

“Even so, not many people around here would do that,” He said and Sabrina grimaced, as if that notion was distasteful, and it probably was to her with her strange mortal-influenced moral code.

“Prudence is a bitch, but no one deserves to die in such a barbaric way.”

“Yeah she’s not the easiest person to like.”

“You didn’t seem to have much trouble in that department the other night,” Sabrina quipped, and Nick caught another one of her sidelong glances, like she wanted to ask him more, and yet couldn’t quite bring herself to do so.

“Having some fun at an orgy isn’t really the same thing as liking someone. I don’t like Luke at all.”

“I wouldn’t know, never been to an orgy,” she said, back going all rigid and Nick swallowed back a laugh at the dignified expression she’d put on her face. It was almost too easy and an excellent diversion from his own frustration.

“Not strictly speaking true though, is it Spellman? Not anymore. Watching is its own form of participation, you know. Just tell us if that’s what you’re into.”

She nearly startled off the railing at that, catching herself just in time as she shot him an indignant glare. This time Nick didn’t quite manage to hold back his laughter, which only made her look more ruffled.

“I’ll see you in class tomorrow, Nick,” she hastily muttered when she slid off the stonework, brushing her skirt down with cheeks much redder than before.

“You’ll see me?” He asked, still chuckling.

She didn’t dignify that with answer, but he was pretty sure he heard her mutter _Satan save me from warlocks_ as she stomped off in direction of the doors leading back into the academy.

Much too easy.

She was right though.

As triumphant Sabrina seemed over her victory against Blackwood, Prudence appeared equally as sad while he watched her go about her business at the academy on the day after the ceremony, lashing out at everyone.

He counted three students crying during dinner due to Prudence’s sharp tongue, a personal record for her as far as he knew, insults landing with such startling precision he was half scared to approach her himself, following them at a distance for a while. 

As he trailed after the sisters, he saw Dorcas reach out with trembling fingers to stroke across her sleeve, and Agatha try to lace their fingers, only to be scattered by an impatient gesture from Prudence’ hands. Judging from the way the two of them hurried off after that, it seemed that Prudence really was indiscriminate in her fury.

“So, am I going to have to call you Prudence Blackwood now?” Nick asked, when he caught up with her, bracing for a tongue lashing himself. Violence too perhaps.

At least Prudence sneered and her eyes narrowed at him, looking for all intents and purposes like she was ready to launch herself at him like a wild animal. Upset for sure.

“Sabrina told you,”

“No, Dorcas did,” Nick lied, pushing Dorcas headfirst into the grave without a care.

“Little traitor,” Prudence muttered, looking over her shoulder in the direction Agatha and Dorcas had taken of in, and Nick smirked at the schooling Prudence was no doubt going to give her sister.

“Still, quite the upgrade. From Night-sister to Blackwood-bastard.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Prudence said, a little of the venom bleeding out of her voice, sounding tired most of all when she began to walk down the corridor and left him to start after her to continue their conversation.

“Why? He won’t acknowledge you?”

“What do you think,” she said, head held high, but walking next to her he could see the muscle working in her jaw.

“Just as much an asshole as he ever was then,” Nick said with a roll of his eyes, and was pretty sure he caught split second look of appreciation from under her heavy lashes.

“That’s my father you’re talking about,” she deadpanned, and Nick couldn’t help a snort of laughter, quickly stifling it when he caught tense expression on her face.

“At least you know something about where you came from, you always wanted that,” Nick supplied, remembering their conversations from years and Prudence glared at him as though he had violated some contract by mentioning things, she’d told him when they were younger and less guarded about their confidences.

“Yeah, great, I know that my father won’t claim me and that my mother was so weak as to kill herself over a man.”

“What had you hoped for then?” He asked, genuinely curious, she’d never told him that.

“Nothing,” Prudence hissed, and stopped walking so suddenly he nearly tripped over his own feet to follow suit. “It’s no good to rely on other people.”

He smiled, reaching out to tug a little on her earring, but Prudence waved his hand off before it could get a hold of her.

“Come now Prudence. You’re know none of us cut out of for pity, so…”

“… Don’t try to fish for it,” she said, continuing the little mantra she’d told him when he first arrived at the academy, and he was pleased to see a hint of smile on her mouth.

There was a pause, a beat, before Nick finished: “No good ever comes of that.”

“Leave me alone, Nicky,” Prudence said after a moment, beginning to walk again. “I’m tired looking at your face.

“Pru…” he called after her, willing her to turn around, and he got his wish. Prudence did a half pivot in his direction, raising her brow as if to make him get on with it.

“I’m glad Mildred was the one to get eaten.”

“I’m sorry for the Dark Lord,” Prudence said, turning around again, getting the last word as she disappeared around the corner. “Imagine having to listen to her ramble forever.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part of the original one-shot version of this fic that conviced me that I needed to expand into multi-chapter writing (the fact that I expanded way more than intended is just me being a dumbass). Because there is no fucking way that Nick didn't have some serious conversations with Prudence in between everything that was going on. 
> 
> In the next chapter, Nick helps a freshly baptised Sabrina put some things into perspective.


	13. Conspirator

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back, so is Nick, and he's tying to help Sabrina deal with her baptism. 
> 
> This is basically trying to bridge the gap between Sabrina destroying the thirteen and trying on the weird sisters for size. Because we all know that something had to have gone before that.

He had thought the dreams would stop after the thirteen disappeared by from Greendale.

After all it wasn’t hard putting two and two together when the threat of the Red Death had departed, fading like so much mist, and left him and Sabrina’s pigheaded mortal boy to share the eerie quiet that had followed as the whole world seemed to let out a sigh of relief.

The Dark Lord had gotten what he wanted. Sabrina had given in and signed her name away, and lit the world on fire in the process. The smell of it still clung to her skin when Nick had teleported to the Spellman house and caught Sabrina – anointed with ashes, all the gold drained from her hair – staggering up the steps as if drunk.

All of her fresh power sang against his fingertips when he reached out to steady her, exhilarating in its potency, but Sabrina lurched away from him as if she could barely stand to be touched at all.

“Thanks for helping out, Nick,” she said, voice just as flat as her face was stricken, while she fumbled her way through the door, leaving Nick to stand by himself in the cold.

Not quite the thanks he had hoped for from her after what he had risked to protect her mortal. The Dark Lord ought to be happy though.

Nick was wrong about that too.

The Dark Lord wasn’t satisfied. Nick knew was much when he woke up in the dark that same night, heart pounding.

Dreaming again.

He wasn’t sure they strictly speaking were dreams. Not really. The colours were a bit too bright, the sensations too acute. It was always the same though. No matter whether the dreams came three nights in a row or if there was several days between them.

The snort of some great, furry animal, a weight pressing on his chest and a burst of scalding heat that always made him jolt awake.

He knew what it meant. Had known it since the first time it had happened, after the Dark Lord had asked for his devotion. It was like a cattle prod urging him to get back onto Sabrina Spellman’s path. Evidently the Dark Lord did not consider Nick’s work done.

But Nick didn’t want to push her. From the look on her face as she’d staggered into her house, Nick figured the baptism hadn’t been a joyful experience for her. She had looked like someone who’d had her soul sucked out and then crammed back in.

Nick could relate, and so, he bided his time and went where he always did. The library.

Actual reports of hellfire were precious few and he ran out of direct sources within a day, and was forced to take his research elsewhere and cross referenced everything he could about delayed baptisms and half-mortal witches.

He couldn’t escape the feeling that he was missing something important about the whole convoluted series of events that had been visited on the coven since Sabrina had come of age. It was a nagging worse than anything the Dark Lord was sending his way.

Though if he was doing the proper thing and considering all possibilities, his itching devil’s claw and restless sleeping could have something to do with his paranoia too – and Nick finally relented and teleported to the edge of the Spellman property.

Coated by fresh fallen snow and wreathed in fresh green pine and fairy lights, the old house looked more like one of those snow globes that the mortals liked so much. He turned the book over in his hands a few times, running through a few opening lines that might gain him entry to the house if it was either of Sabrina’s formidable aunts who answered the door.

Neither of them turned out to be necessary, because it was Ambrose Spellman on the other side of the door when Nick found his feet and reached the top of the stairs to knock. Dressed for evening in a deep crimson robe that half hanged off of him.

Ambrose’s disinterested expression immediately became very interested when he looked Nick up and down, lips quirking up into a mischievous grin.

“You do not waste time do you, Nicholas?”

“Hello to you too, Ambrose.”

“Yes, yes, hello,” Ambrose said, waving off the implied reprimand in Nick’s words and gestured for him to come in from the cold.

He hadn’t actually seen much of the Spellman household the last time he had been there, too busy chasing a sultrily giggling Agatha up the stairs to Ambrose’s attic room. Now he snuck a few quick glances around the space, trying to gather more insights to this oddest of families in their coven.

Ambrose was watching him with poorly concealed curiosity when Nick turned back round, lounging against the bannister with the same loose-limbed, well sexed elegance he always seemed to wear, even before there had been any actual sexing going on.

“Just so you know, my dear cousin is in a bit of sulk tonight,” Ambrose said with a theatrical sigh.

“Are you telling me to back off or something?” Nick asked, brows furrowing and scrambled to form a defense of why Ambrose should let him go to Sabrina’s room.

“Nah,” Ambrose drawled, shrugging his robe on properly with a grin that didn’t seem all too sympathetic. “Sabrina’s a proper witch now, she can tell you to piss off herself if that’s what she wants. It might even cheer her up to do so.”

Nick chuckled at that idea, strangely happy that he agreed with that analysis. It felt like a victory to match opinions on her with someone like Ambrose. Like he was starting to understand her. At least a little.

“Such a waste,” Ambrose muttered, looking Nick over once again with blatant appreciation. “My little cousin has no idea what should be done with a warlock like you.”

“I’m just here to give her a book,” Nick protested despite the flirtatious grin that automatically made its way onto his face at the compliment, making the book in question appear in his hand.

“Probably a good call, although if someone could use a spot of seduction, it's her,” Ambrose grumbled, sounding genuinely disappointed about the whole thing before grabbing a hold of Nick shoulders and turning him towards the stairs. “It’s the second door on the left.”

Resisting the urge to snoop, Nick headed towards Sabrina’s room with no delay. A low warbling of what he was pretty sure was mortal Christmas carols came through the door.

Though muffled, the contrariness clearly came through in Sabrina’s voice, even above the caroling, when he knocked.

“Go away, Ambrose. I’m not in the mood.”

“Want me to leave too?”

“Nick?” There was a shuffle of movement in the room, he could hear the music being turned down, Sabrina approaching the door.

“Afraid so.”

Her silence was loaded, and Nick felt a smile tug on his face he waited. With all the time he had spent looking at her, he could only too easily imagine the expression on her face. Disgruntled and confused all at once – the way she usually looked at him if he was being honest.

“Give me a second,” she said and Nick heard more shuffling on the other side.

When she opened the door, Sabrina had the look of someone freshly and sloppily glamoured. Her slack and sweater were a bit too spotless, the curl of her hair too symmetrical, and Nick couldn’t help but wonder how hard she had been wallowing since he had seen her last.

It had been difficult not to take her lack of enthusiasm personally after risking his life for the Kinkle boy, but the look in her eyes had been so desperately conflicted that any offense had been impossible to sustain.

After all, it wasn’t like the night had been a total waste. It had been very illuminating to spend time with the other side of the wreckage of Sabrina’s relationship, the same heavy perfume of melancholia clinging to the both of them – it was still present in the soft downturn of Sabrina’s mouth, the corner of her eyes as she stood before him now.

“Still haven’t quite figured out what to call that colour,” he said, making an effort to shut down the wild tumble of his thoughts.

“What?”

He was a little relieved to see she was still capable of her unique flavour of puzzlement, the cute little nose scrunch that made him itch to kiss her, the furrowing crinkle of her brows.

“Your new hair colour,” Nick explained.

White seemed too mundane, and ash blonde didn’t take into account how glossy and soft it looked under the muted lights in her bedroom, like the pearls he remembered hanging around his mother’s neck.

“Ghostly?” Sabrina said, puzzlement fading in favour of something that seemed like bitterness, as she stepped back to let him come inside – Nick caught sight of Ambrose giving him a thumbs up from further down the hall and stopped short of rolling his eyes at her cousin’s nosiness as he followed her.

“You seem alive and kicking to me,” he protested as he closed the door behind him, and then raised his brows as he took in her room, the tinsel draped across her walls and furniture. “… and very Christmassy.”

There was overlap, he knew, between mortal Christmas and Yule, but he had never seen a witch dwelling outfitted with a santa figure before. At least he was pretty sure that was the name of the red cheeked, white bearded man sat on her book shelf.

He had been wondering why the Dark Lord was still pestering him to keep an eye on Sabrina now that she had signed her name away, but perhaps this was why. Not the Christmas decorations in itself of course – at least Nick sincerely hoped their master was not quite so petty as to resent some tacky decorations – but what they symbolised.

“You’re gonna tell me why you’re here, Nick?”

“Yeah, I wanted to drop this off with you in case I forget before heading off for the Winter Solstice,” he said, pulling the book out from his jacket pocket,

Sabrina didn’t seem all too interested in the book though, frowning at him when she looked up from the leatherbound pages.

“Off? Where are you going?” She asked, and Nick wondered if he was being vain or if there was sincere interest in the question.

“The unholy lands.”

“And what’s in the unholy lands?”

“Hot sun, a desert and lots of libraries with research opportunities.”

A strange look crossed her face, settling in the tilt of her brows. Not one he could readily interpret, even though he thought he’d gotten pretty familiar with Sabrina’s facial expressions.

“You’re not spending the break with family?”

“I’ve only got some distant cousins left, and I’m not close with any of them. No Scratches left except me.”

There was a soft bump next to him, and Nick looked away from the odd expression on Sabrina’s face to see her familiar – Salem as far as he recalled – staring up at him from her desk. Not hostile like he had been when Nick astral projected into the room as Agatha vomited dirt and Tommy Kinkle grew hungrier, but curious judging from the tilt of his head.

When Nick reached out with a cautious hand, Salem pushed a cold nose against his fingers, and Nick strangled a grin when he heard a muffled, outraged gasp from Sabrina.

“You’re a very handsome fellow when you’re not hissing at me,” he said, scratching behind Salem’s ears, and this time he couldn’t quite keep the smug grin off his face when Salem squirmed with almost indecent delight at the touch.

“He’s just a sucker for praise,” Sabrina grumbled, her eyes glued to his hand stroking along Salem’s arched back when Nick turned his attention back to her. “You had something for me?”

“Right, yeah, here it is,” he took his hand of Salem to move towards her, but the cat yowled a protest, and Nick laughed, resuming the scratching. “Looks like you need to come over here.”

Sabrina sighed and muttered what sounded suspiciously like ‘not an actual cat you little monster’ as she moved closer, plucking the book from his hand.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

“Igni Satanae: A history of fire,” Sabrina muttered, thumbing the old gold lettering on the first page.

“It’s old, so the prose is a bit bloated, but I figured you might be a bit interested in your fellow brothers and sisters who managed to do what you did.”

The melancholic downturn to her mouth grew more pronounced and her eyes were full of conflict when she looked up at him, much as there had been on the night of the event itself.

“Does everyone know?”

“Incinerating the hanging tree is not exactly a subtle statement, Spellman. Mortals might think it’s because of the storm, but it’s hard to disguise literal hellfire to a witch,” Nick remarked with a shrug. “It’s still smoking.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Sabrina muttered, and trudged back to the bed, none of the usual spring in her step. “Haven’t been around to look at it.”

There it was again, the strange duality. Sabrina had written herself into witch history with that one feat alone. Most witches would be beside themselves with joy. Nick would have, but Sabrina Spellman appeared miserable more than anything else.

Looking down at Salem, Nick found the familiar staring back up at him as if conspiratorial before he jumped off the desk and left Nick to approach Sabrina, settling on the edge of her bed.

The Dark Lord had asked him to be a guide for Sabrina on the path of night, show her a good time and Nick knew how to read between the lines. Knew to act just as much a lure as a guide for her, but the Sabrina who aimlessly flicked through the book he’d given her didn’t look like she needed a good time.

Not in the usual way that Nick provided fun at least.

“You know, if you read the book, you’ll find that the second witch to conjure hellfire was also the first witch to rise into a teaching position in her church.”

“What?”

“Second case study, a badass lady by all accounts. All three of them were. It’s a pretty remarkable club that you’ve joined, Spellman.”

She stopped flicking through the pages. The twist to her mouth had become tremulous and she muttered something under her breath. He couldn’t hear it properly, but the body language was clear enough.

“It disturbed you, didn’t it?” He asked, but didn’t get more than a mute nod from her in response.

“Why? Was it worse than cutting Agatha’s throat and opening up the gates to the netherrealms?”

Nick could still get the shivers thinking about that night himself, half excitement, half horror when he remembered the sound of the gates creaking open, the grave cold creeping up on his bones and what came after – Agatha vomiting up mud as though she was turning to dirt from the inside out.

Sabrina was quiet for so long that Nick started to feel as though he might even have been too presumptuous by settling on the bed, and tried to think of a way to retreat without seeming too obvious about it. He was about to start back pedalling when Salem jumped onto the bed between them, rumbling with a purr, and Sabrina let out a shaky exhale.

“I didn’t know I would be capable of accessing something like that, or that I…”

“Would enjoy it?” Nick guessed as Sabrina faltered, evidently hitting bull’s-eye judging from the way she grimaced.

“You saved Greendale and you beat the thirteen. You’re telling me you can’t allow yourself to feel good about that?”

“I don’t know?” she muttered, sounding more like she was speaking to herself than to him. “If I had to touch something that dark to access it that shouldn’t feel like a cause for celebration, should it?”

“You asking me or telling me? Can never quite tell with you.”

There was a barely there twitch to her lips and the glassy, introspective look in her eyes became present again as she glanced up at him. Nick felt a rush of triumph as the metaphorical storm cloud over her head seemed to abate a little.

“What do you think?”

“I think that working with transgressive magics is supposed to be scary, that’s the only way we know that we’ve pushed the boundaries of our capabilities.”

“It’s that simple is it?” she asked and some of the dry Spellman sass had returned to her voice.

“No,” he admitted with a chuckle. “Magic is rarely simple, even when it seems like it, but we all got our dark corners. With magic it’s just a matter of controlling it so that you don’t get lost in them.”

She pulled her legs up under her, chin coming down to rest on her knee as she mulled over what he was saying. Nick relaxed against the pillows, giving Salem an absentminded belly scratch.

“You know you can be pretty profound when you don’t try to turn every conversation into an attempt at flirting,” she muttered after a while, a soft look in her eyes and Nick’s chest felt strangely tight all of a sudden.

“Who says that flirting can’t be profound, Spellman?” he shot back, and before he could stop himself, he barrelled on ahead. “Especially when it’s with your cute self.”

Judging by the surprised flutter of her eyelashes, he was declaring his interest the wrong way all over again, but as he prepared himself for another reinforcement of boundaries, something else happened.

Her gaze dropped to his lips and there was a split-second burst of warm interest on her face that looked so out of place against her general melancholia that it was impossible to miss. Even if it was there and gone again in a blink of an eye.

She wouldn’t push him away if he tried to kiss her now. Nick was sure of it. The posture of her body had gone all soft, angled towards him as if she’d swayed closer without even realising it. He could already feel her mouth on his, and yet, absurdly, Nick all of a sudden didn’t want to lean in.

He didn’t want to kiss her when she looked sad.

Or embarrassed.

Which she did as soon as their eyes met and she realised that he had been paying attention to her reactions.

Unlike the vulnerable look of attraction on her face, the embarrassment lingered in the thinning of her lips and the way she tugged her arms around her legs. Nick restlessly reached down to pet Salem again, making the familiar’s warm, furry body wriggle with delight once more.

“Your farmboy is not coming over for the burning of the Yule log then?”

The flush rose in her cheeks so suddenly that it appeared a fire had been lit under her skin, intensifying when Nick’s lips quirked up in a smile. Not one to appreciate being called on her interest then.

“You know his name,” Sabrina muttered, giving him a petulant look from under her semi lowered lashes. “I know you know it.”

“Harvey then, and you didn’t answer my question.”

Where he aimed for playful, Sabrina countered with a grimace and looked out the window where the snow was still whirling about.

“I can’t submit him to all of this.”

“What, the glory of your new powers and your sexy new hair.”

“Why did I let you in,” Sabrina muttered to herself, and Nick’s smirk turned into a fully fledged grin.

“Because I risked my ass to protect the hapless mortal,” he drawled and looked down at Salem, who was still purring under Nick’s hand. “Isn’t that right Salem.”

“I’ve thanked you for that.”

“Witch kind say thanks with favours, Spellman, you should know that.”

“I’m in your debt then?”

He couldn’t read her expression when he looked up at her, not really remembering how he had come to find himself almost flat on his back on her bed, Sabrina looming over him with her halo of pearly hair.

“No,” he sighed, feeling entirely too comfortable laid out before her. “But I’m sure you’ll be able to find some kind of way to pay me back.”

“Nick…” Sabrina protested, brows pulling together in a reprimanding frown, obviously second guessing if there was any kind of innuendo behind his words. For once there wasn’t, and Nick grinned.

“All I mean is, you have your powers now, and can’t give them back,” he chuckled, raising his hands in deference. “Might as well see what you can do with them, I’m sure it’ll be a benefit to us all someday.”

The silence that came after wasn’t quite comfortable, but not unpleasant either. Sabrina taking over petting duties for Salem, her delicate little hand a pale contrast to his dark fur. Her gaze kept darting in Nick’s direction though.

“I should get going,” he said, sitting up straight and finding himself at eye level with Sabrina once more.

Sabrina nodded, scrabbling a bit further back against the headboard as he got to his feet. He was almost at the door before she spoke again.

“Nick.”

When he turned, hand resting on the doorknob, she was smiling, the first proper smile she’d given him that night.

“Thank you.”

“You got it, Spellman.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Salem's the real winner in this chapter, gets all the pets because Nick and Sabrina can't quite figure out how to touch one another yet. 
> 
> To be honest, I'm not quite sure what comes next chapter, because I'm dumb and I'm maybe, possibly considering adding another chapter to the story. Because I crave a bit more happiness. 
> 
> Gonna crawl into my social distancing cave and think about it.


	14. Lover

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nick struggles with his feelings of fear, love and jealousy after Sabrina is killed and resurrected in the desecrated church. 
> 
> No special trigger warnings this time round apart from what is already in the tags: Some mentions of gore and Nick and Sabrina being absolutely unable to keep their hands off of each other.

The smell of blood had abated in the dormitory. Soaked sheets stripped and floors wiped with cleansing spells from the members of the academy who were still on their feet, rather than huddled on the beds or curled up against each other in an uneasy show of comfort.

And yet, Nick still felt sick to his stomach. The feeling sticking around even after Sabrina had woken up and spirited the freshly healed Ambrose away to the mortuary, pressing a distracted kiss into the corner of Nick’s mouth on her way out and leaving behind the taste of blood and magic.

It didn’t feel right that she should leave. Not when Nick had barely gotten to feel her whole and safe again before she’d pulled away. Not when he still had so many questions, at least half of which he could see reflected back at him in the faces the other witches and warlocks left to clean up the destruction left in the witch hunters’ wake. 

Elspeth couldn’t stop clutching her throat as if she was the girl with the ribbon round her neck, afraid her head was going to roll off if she let go. Melvin looked shell shocked – though whether that was because of his embrace with death or Dorcas furtively trying to pet his hair was difficult to tell.

The last thing Nick had thought of when he pushed Melvin into Dorcas’ path during Lupercalia was that something would come of it. All he’d really been concerned with was getting her off of his back, but watching Dorcas’ fledgling, covert concern for the blood soaked Melvin made Nick’s own hands cramp up with the need for a similar intimacy.

He wanted to check over Sabrina as he had gotten such little chance to do before she had teleported. Wanted to make sure her puncture wounds really were healed over and that her precious lungs still took in air, wanted to feel the flutter of her pulse underneath his fingers.

Desperate to find something – anything – to do sent him in Prudence’s direction. Though bloodied and soot stained, Prudence’s shoulders were set, projecting the strength and authority befit of a high priest’s daughter, trying to whip their school mates into shape. Made them work to see to each other’s needs instead of roaming around like somnambulists, useless to everyone.

“Someone needs to get word to my father,” she said, seeming more as if she was speaking to herself, once Nick was at her side.

“You need to get your own injuries looked at first, Pru,” Nick muttered, putting his hands on her neck and tilting her head to get a better look her cheek and jaw – the nasty purpling bruises spreading under her dark skin.

The touch was skirting the edge of presumptuous given the increasingly antagonistic nature of their encounters over the past few weeks, but Prudence didn’t move away. That more than anything else Nick had seen or heard that night was a testament to how terrifying the witch hunters’ invasion had been.

She was rattled down to the darkest depths of her eyes. Now that he had put his hands on her, the tenseness in her frame telegraphed its way to the very tips of Nick’s fingers.

“What the fuck happened tonight, Nicky?” She muttered, too low for anyone else to hear.

“You were there,” he said, but Prudence merely made a half distressed, non-committal sound, gaze going distant as though she was looking at far of places.

Nick feathered his thumb against a bruise on her cheek, a twitch in her face revealing how tender she was all over, and her eyes snapped back to his.

“What did you see,” Nick asked, not trusting the observations of the Kinkle boy, who’d been too preoccupied with his heroism and rifle to understand what he had seen.

“Nothing that even remotely made sense,” Prudence hissed, gaze flickering to Elspeth and Melvin before returning to his face. “Nicky, her eyes were white, and her voice… It was all wrong, like it was someone else in there with her.”

He heard the Dark Lord’s whisper in his ear then, as though he was standing right next to him. Requesting him to keep Sabrina entertained, pull her down the path of night.

Was this what he had wanted Nick to lead her to, and what was _this_? None of what Kinkle or Prudence, for all her smarts, had said made any sense. Self-resurrection wasn’t possible, it went against all laws of nature and magic.

For a wild, desperate moment he wanted to spill the whole thing to Prudence who kept staring at him with eyes slightly too wide, as if she was trying to unspool his brain, but he grit his teeth against the urge.

He couldn’t blaspheme the devotion. It was an impossibility. It was the most intimate sacrament they had with the Dark Lord. Their most important link to his love and his will. He hadn’t even told Sabrina, no matter how many times he felt weighted down by the burden of keeping the Dark Lord’s particular interest in her to himself.

And he wasn’t a fool either. After Blackwood had brought Prudence up to assist him during his wedding to Zelda Spellman, Nick was no longer sure whose creature she was. He was alone with his doubts.

“Nicholas,” Prudence prompted, tugging on his shirt and Nick abruptly let go of her.

“I have to go,” he muttered, pushing her hand away and turned on his heel to head towards the exit.

“The chance to play hero has passed, remember,” she hissed after him, venom in her voice. “Her mortal saw to that.”

Nick swallowed back a sneer and pushed past the others and their dazed stares and scattered sobs. The smell of blood and panic sweat disappeared as he shoved open the double doors that led to the outside, heaving a breath of the cold spring air.

He was halfway through willing his way to Sabrina when Prudence’s words reverberated back through his thoughts and he dropped the spell again, gritting his teeth.

It was no surprise that Prudence was precise in her viciousness. She usually was when it came to him, knowing all of his well-guarded buttons. Just as he knew hers in turn.

In some way, it was hard not to feel as frustrated with himself as she was. The academy had barely survived, people he had shared his life with for years almost lost for good, Sabrina pierced by arrows and despite that, he couldn’t help the jealousy that ran through it all like a dark current.

He hadn’t planned on spying. At least he didn’t think he had, not entirely. He had wanted to keep an eye on her, still not quite believing that she had gotten through death and resurrection unscathed, but suspiciousness had propelled him along as well, needing to know if what she told the mortal boy would be more or less honest than what she would tell the others afterwards.

It stood to reason that he got to see both more and less of what he had feared about her and the mortal’s interaction. The intensity of the bond that still connected them was plain to see even if she had only kissed his cheek. 

Jealousy wasn’t a stranger to Nick; witches were covetous creatures by default, but it had never felt like the nagging, uneasy ache that Nick got in deep in his gut when he saw Sabrina and the Kinkle boy together.

Try as he might, there were parts of her that Nick couldn’t reach. Not fully. No matter how eager Nick was to understand her mortal side, no matter how many high school dances and horror double features he went to, he would always be witch-blooded through and through. Forever just out of step with it all.

She missed it too. Her mortality, the lack of complications in it. As absurd as it seemed, he knew she did. For all her love of her powers, Sabrina was terrified by them too, he suspected that she sometimes, in private, wondered what it would be like to be a mortal girl with no knowledge of the witch world.

Kinkle was a steady, constant reminder of that with his annoying high mindedness and trusting kindness.

And Prudence had been wrong. Harvey Kinkle didn’t have to play at being hero. He was the blueprint for one. Storming into battle despite being preposterously outgunned, buoyed by nothing more than certainty in his moral fortitude. In all the mortal stories that Nick had read, guys like Harvey Kinkle ended up with the girl in the end, while guys like Nick got shot off to the side. The sluts and liars.

“Lanuae magicae,” he snapped, before he could second guess himself again, and opened his eyes on the foyer of the Spellman mortuary.

“Who’s there?”

Hilda Spellman’s voice was sharp enough that Nick raised his hands when she made it into the hall, a heavy rolling pin brandished in front of her.

The expression on her face wasn’t exactly warm when she took him in, nothing like her open sentimentality when Kinkle had showed up earlier, but she lowered her makeshift club.

“Everything still okay over there?”

“Cleaner,” Nick said with a grimace. “But everyone is still pretty rattled.” 

“No wonder,” Hilda sighed, tucking the rolling pen into her apron. “I’m trying to prepare food for everyone, make sure they have some fortification.”

“I’m sure everyone will appreciate that, Miss Spellman. I…” He trailed off a bit, Hilda’s relative frostiness always made him feel off kilter, not used to his charm not working. “Do you need any help?”

She scoffed, shaking her head, but the frown on her face softened a little. “Bless you for offering, Nicholas, but why don’t you just go upstairs to check on Sabrina like you no doubt came here to do?”

“Thank you, Miss Spellman.”

She waved him off with a grumpy sort of noise and headed back into her kitchen as Nick rushed up the stairs to Sabrina’s room.

The door was open, the room empty, and for a split second the panic rushed up into his throat, sour and dark, until he realized there was steam coming out from under her door.

“Give me a minute,” she said through the door as he knocked, a sloshing of water following her words.

He felt unsettled in his body in a way he hadn’t for a long, long time. He wasn’t one given to pacing around, but as he waited, his hands fluttered across Sabrina’s things, picking one knickknack up only to abandon it and pick up the nearest object instead until he finally managed to sit down on her bed just as she opened the door.

She looked wonderfully alive as she came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam, skin flushed from the heat of her bath, white robe wrapped around her.

“What are you doing here, Nick? Did something happen,” She asked, squeezing a bit of water from her pearly blonde hair, brows pulled together in a frown.

There was a sarcastic reply on his tongue: Nothing but the girl I love dying and coming back to life of her own volition, but he stopped himself.

“I needed to see if you were still okay,” he said, reaching out a hand, and his heart did a little stutter when Sabrina didn’t hesitate before moving forward and taking it, letting him pull her down on the bed next to him.

“I’m fine,” she breezed, smiling, pressing a quick kiss to his hand before letting go. “But thank you for checking up on me.

The gesture was too chaste, too reminiscent of what she had given to Kinkle. He wanted to wrap her up in his arms and keep her with him, for her to show him that he too held onto some part of her that no one else did.

He had told her once that he didn’t mind sharing her with the mortal, but he was no longer sure that he would. Or even could. His own insecurities poking up through his skin like jagged glass.

“I hate that I wasn’t with you. In the church when it all went down,” he muttered instead, fingers curling round the edge of the bed to keep them from fidgeting,

“You couldn’t have been,” Sabrina said, confusion on her face, obviously not understanding what he was trying to say, her frown intensifying when she continued. “Otherwise you…”

“Otherwise I would have been there… “ Nick said, cutting her off, his heart pounding so hard he could scarce hear his own voice when he added. “To be the one to catch you.”

He caught a glimpse of a guilty thinning of her lips before he looked down, realizing that was not what he had wanted to see. Rather wanting to hear her deny it.

“You heard that.”

“Yeah,” he muttered heart in his throat before looking back at her, seeing the uncertainty on her face, and he understood all at once that she was scared too. Of what her resurrection meant. “But I’m here now, for whatever you need.”

“This is unchartered territory Nick,” she said, eyes soft, a little anxious. “Do you think you can handle it?”

He smiled. There was something the mortal would never be able to understand. The pull of power, her witch blood boiling in her veins. Wanting to rage and conquer. The feeling that all witches struggled with at one time or another.

“What are warlock boyfriend’s for?”

She grinned at that, the gloom in her eyes abating before she closed them and leaned into him. Nick met her halfway. The first kiss was soft, barely a press of lips, but that soon changed.

As their lips broke apart, Sabrina let out a little noise of protest and leaned in again, hand coming up to wrap around his neck, keep him with her as she pressed another kiss to his lips. And then another one, pulling him down to the bed with her.

The intensity ramped up wildly between them, much faster than usual. Sabrina preferred getting warmed up a bit before properly starting to make out. Not so tonight. When Nick looped an arm around her, fingers spreading along her back to hold her, she cupped his jaw to bring his mouth more firmly against hers and Nick opened to her tongue.

“Spellman?” he muttered when they had to come up for air, breathing ragged and head swimming, not quite sure what he was asking.

Sabrina ignored it, evidently not in the mood for talk, teeth nipping at his lower lip before their mouths found their way back to each other again. And again. Each kiss more feverish than the last.

They didn’t stop until Sabrina, seeming caught up in the moment, slung a leg over his side, and pressed herself closer. All the blood that had already starting to flow southward rushed down instead and Nick let out a startled grunt. 

Sabrina froze, and Nick followed suit, afraid to spook her. It was by no means the first time things had gotten very heated between them, but it felt more intimate with Sabrina in her robe, far more intimate than seeing her in all her luxurious lingerie on Lupercalia.

He tried not to wonder too much about what lay underneath; if he would get to see her naked if he pulled on the knotted belt pressing against his belly.

“I’m so happy that you’re here, Spellman,” he confessed instead, focusing on the deep flush in her cheeks as her eyes opened to look at him. “I don’t know what I would have done…”

As his voice wavered, choked off by an unexpected lump in his throat, the anxiousness on her face melted away, gaze softening as she reached up to brush her thumb across his cheek, his lower lip.

“I’m not going anywhere, Nick,” she hushed him, and the tension began to fade from her body. “I like living too much, I…”

“What?” he prompted when she faltered, voice rough. 

“I like you too much to go anywhere,” she said and before he could do much more than smile, happiness spreading in his chest like the warm bloom of a shot of bourbon, she was kissing him again.

Nick groaned into her mouth when she rolled her hips against his and Nick finally slid his hand down from her back to cup her thigh to urge her closer, relishing the feel of her naked flesh under his hand.

She chuckled, a breathless little noise, and then reached up to dig her fingers into his shoulder, giving him a bit of a push. Nick obeyed the wordless order and rolled onto his back, Sabrina following him and settling astride his hips which in turn made Nick inhale sharply. 

They’d been in that exact position on the night that the antipope was murdered and a blood dripping Ambrose had interrupted them, but there as a different light in her eyes now. Something wild and hungry, like she wanted more than just kiss and lick and nip until they were both half-crazy with it.

“You look very handsome like this,” Sabrina muttered, and Nick laughed, attempting to reach up for her, but Sabrina shook her head.

Grabbing a hold of his wrists, she pressed them down to the bed again, above his head. For a brief second their faces were within reach for another kiss, and Nick raised his brows at her. The flush in her cheeks deepened, but she didn’t close the last bit of distance.

Instead she sat up again and looked down at him to admire her handiwork, fingers idly toying with with the buttons of his shirt. Nick didn’t say anything as she began to pop them open, keeping his hands where she had put them, clenching them into fists as her palms slid up his chest. 

When she reached his neck, her fingers lingered, pressed to his throat as if taking his pulse, her breath coming in quick little pants. And then her thumb shifted, leaving its place against his jugular, tracing across his chin and then stopped as it pushed against the front of his throat.

The pressure against his windpipe was faint enough to barely be there at all, but when he swallowed, his Adam’s apple worked against her fingers and Nick went rigid. Terribly and terrifyingly turned on. He could feel himself get even harder under the spread of her hips.

“You’re trembling,” Sabrina whispered, and Nick could scarcely breathe for how much he wanted her, nodding a confirmation instead.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve never wanted anyone so much as I want you,” Nick confessed, voice rough, and Sabrina’s lips quirked up into the softest of smiles that would have looked innocent if not for the heat still flaring in her eyes. 

“You’re mine?” She breathed and Nick nodded feverishly, struggling to understand his absurd good fortune in someone like her, deadly and sweet all at once, crossing his path.

“Yes,” he murmured, wetting his lips. “Yes, I am all yours.”

She didn’t answer, but her smile widened before she leaned down to kiss him again, hand releasing his throat. Nick groaned into her mouth, not quite sure if it was from the loss of her grip or the way she rolled her hips. 

Her movements began to pick up speed, nothing languid about it anymore, quick, sharp presses that made her gasp and Nick feel delirious. Staring up at her concentrated little frown, he could no longer make himself lie still, and his hands flew to her hips, forcing her firmer against him.

She stopped moving all at once, eyes widening as she let out a little, squeaky sort of moan, hips tensing under his hands, and Nick felt as though the bottom had dropped out of his stomach, so intense was the rush of lust that washed over him.

“Did you just…?” Nick started to ask, before getting stuck halfway done, not sure how graphic Sabrina would appreciate him being.

She liked being praised and told she was stunning, but he hadn’t ventured anything more explicit than that before. Judging from the renewed flush in her cheeks, and her bashfulness when she ducked her head, Nick didn’t have to get literal.

On the other hand, he wasn’t quite satisfied with coyness and half a confirmation either, and Nick tensed the muscles in his thigh – giving it a bit of a jerk. That did the trick; Sabrina’s gaze snapped straight to his in time with a sharp gasp as she had to reach out to support herself against his chest lest she lose her balance. 

“That happen with anyone else around before?”

“No,” she admitted, shoulders dipping a bit, obviously feeling put on the spot. “First time.”

He tried not to grin, but it was impossible when so much smugness welled up inside of him, and got the exact reaction he figured he would. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” she scolded, giving his chest a push, but Nick caught her hand in his, bringing it to his mouth where he could press a warm, openmouthed kiss to her pulse, and he decided to be bold.

“Not a chance, not when you look so fucking hot when you come,” he chuckled, and Sabrina’s eyes widened, not unappreciatively as far as he could tell, simply startled.

Virginity was heavily erotized at the academy, but Nick had never been particular prone to that sort of kink. Although as he took in Sabrina’s furious blushing and his own sense of wild accomplishment to be the first to see her wracked by orgasm, he could see the appeal. 

He felt shaky with the desire to get her out of her robe and put his hands on her so he could make her do it again and again – properly this time, more intense than the sharp little jolt from before – until she was limp and vulnerable and she clung to him with a wild, loving look in her eyes.

“How was it then?” he asked after he’d swallowed thickly, forcing himself to focus on her face rather than the heavy throb of his dick.

“Nice enough,” she said after a moment, staring him straight in the face with an intensity that made Nick want to blush as hot as she did.

“Just nice enough?” Nick muttered. “I can do better than nice if you’ll let me help you.”

He snaked his hand under her robe to grip the back of her leg, urge her to press against him, and marvelled at the full body shudder that went through her. Still sensitive, still fired up.

When Sabrina spoke again, just his name said soft and low, there was something that sounded a lot like hesitation in her voice. Nick immediately softened his grip, stroking her thigh instead, trying to soothe rather than arouse.

“There’s still no pressure,” he assured her, and meant it too, despite the breathlessness he could hear in his own voice.

Although when he tried to shuffle into more of a sitting position which seemed a better option if they were going to talk, the heat in Sabrina’s eyes hadn’t diminished at all. In fact, he didn’t even get his mouth open to speak before she leaned back in, pressing her lips to his. When Nick gave up on sitting and dropped back down, she chased after him, the pressure of her body against his making Nick shudder. 

There was a renewed urgency in her, barely reigned in, when her tongue rolled against his. Not unlike how she was fired up when they experimented with spell work. Nick got the vague, distant thought that a lot of her vigour was tied to what had happened in the church, but focusing on anything was difficult when she let out an eager little sigh as she had to come up for air and then sunk her teeth right into his lower lip.

“Nick,” she whispered, mouth catching against his, dark eyes swamped by her blown out pupil.

“Yeah?” he muttered back, smoothing his thumb across her thigh in a gesture that was supposed to be comforting, but made her shiver.

“Can I show you something, without it meaning we have to go further?”

“You decide,” Nick assured her.

“Okay,” she said, sounding more as though she was talking to herself. “Let’s roll over then.”

He chuckled at the practicality in her voice, but did as she asked, getting her on her back beneath him. Her gaze flittered downwards when she felt the press of his cock against her thigh, and a split-second wicked expression made its way across her face when she looked up again.

For a moment he felt as though he was going to bust apart at the seams, heart stuttering with something that felt like lust and love all at once. As if all she had to do to crack him open was to will it, and he’d simply thank her for it.

“What’s up?” he asked, and she snorted a giggle, making Nick roll his eyes when he caught her meaning, voice full of laughter when he spoke again. “You’re being puerile, Spellman.”

A bright eyed, anxious expression made its way onto her face as her giggles subsided, and Nick reached down to stroke her cheek, the curve of her lip. Let the eye contact between them simmer until the slightest crinkle in the corner of her eyes made him fizz with anticipation. 

“I’d like for you to see me,” Sabrina said after a long, quiet moment, teeth digging into her lower lip and then - as if in slow motion - she brought Nick’s hand on her face down to the knot on her bath robe.

He waited for a moment, but the expression on her face didn’t seem to change, the same nervous, lip-biting look sticking around.

The first tug on the knot made her gasp, and he stopped, but Sabrina urged him on with an eager nod. Next one made the belt come undone, and he got the first glimpse of the skin beneath. From her throat to the edge of her lacy panties, a hint of dark blonde pubic hair beneath, and his heart thumped harder still.

Relishing the expectant mood of the moment, noting, in a half abstract sort of way that he could hear the patter of rain against the windows, he swept his hand out, and brushed the rest of the fabric out of the way.

Her flush spread all the way down her chest, a soft fade from her red cheeks to the pale pink of her nipples.

“Do want me to touch you, or just look?” he murmured, as his gaze travelled across the dip of her belly button, the soft curve of her hips, the transparent lace of her underwear. His palms were itchy with the desire to stroke his fingers across her skin.

“Nick?”

He looked up, catching her gaze, and Sabrina reached out, tracing her fingers up his forearm, no longer looking bashful, her eyes too warm and intense for that.

“Kiss me?”

“Anything for you, Spellman”

His lips quirked up in a smile that lingered even as he leaned down to do as she asked, Sabrina rising to meet him, tangling her hands in his hair when her mouth opened to his with a breathless sigh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait - again - but as I was finishing the original three chapters remaining, I realised I needed a bridging chapter between Nick comforting Sabrina and returning from hell. 
> 
> Which means that yes, next chapter deals mostly with hell and has aaaaaall the trigger warnings. 
> 
> Good news is that since all the chapters are now finished I should be getting back to a proper publishing plan. 
> 
> Also, you're more than welcome to come say hi to me on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unseemingowl) :)


	15. Interlude, The Morningstar

Lucifer’s fury doesn’t burn hot. His rage is a glacial thing, like a shard of ice within. In their joint prison in Nick’s mind, it is a vast, frozen landscape where the light of the Morningstar throws everything into merciless, stark relief. A place with nowhere to hide. 

With Lucifer’s icy fire inside of him, Nick doesn’t even feel the constant boil of the city; the furnace of Pandemonium. Even when he’s on his hands and knees on its floors where the heat is strongest, slick with sweat as he is forced to crawl across it until he can kiss the blood off of Lilith’s shoes. 

There’s a pointed, vicious desire to hurt and humiliate in her dark eyes when Nick looks up and Lucifer snarls within, tearing at the binds and forcing Nick to spit poison that only makes Lilith push harder still. 

It is in those moments, when Lucifer’s wrath is turned outwards rather than inwards that Nick senses that there are ghosts other than his own in there with them. 

A smell of ozone, a brush of feathers and then an immense, crushing disappointment as he falls and falls until Nick is pinned down by the harsh, overwhelming truth: The wellspring of Lucifer’s anger will never run dry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this story I'm trying to take more of a metaphorical and mental approach to Nick and Lucifer's battles . Which is what I'm hoping you'll see in this as well as in the upcoming chapter once Nick is pulled back from hell.


	16. Vessel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Extra big, flashing trigger warning here, please read:** I’m trying not to get too graphic with anything in this chapter, because yikes. That being said it deals with Nick’s traumatic experiences in hell, so please proceed with caution. There’s mentions of psychological torture, cannibalism, abuse and mental violation. As before, I’m trying to lean into canon with this story, which also means that this is season 2 Lucifer who had very specific plans for Sabrina and therefore this chapter does include brief mentions of incest and sexual violence. 
> 
> So just be careful with yourself, okay.

His world was too soft as he struggled to regain consciousness.

That set off the first alarm bell.

Nick was too used to emerging into sensations far more intense when he regained consiousness – sharp, burning, biting, freezing – it had been far too long since he’d felt something close to softness for it to mean anything good.

He couldn’t move either, another alarm bell, but fainter. That at least felt on par for the course of what his life was now. Nick seemed to spend just as much time locked inside his own body, weighted down and lead heavy as he did curled into a combative crouch, ready to rip and tear at whatever was sent his way.

Fighting the exhaustion that went deeper than bone, deeper than the very marrow of him, Nick fumbled for his frayed mental defenses, working to gather the threads, only to immediately lose his hold on them when he felt something soft press against his mouth.

Lips.

Warm and familiar, the taste of mint sending a rush to his head and made his eyes shoot open as he tried to take in what was happening around him – nose filling up with the scent of roses and incense and fresh, clean linen. Long gone fragrances, the scent of Sabrina.

It was her bed, her room, her mouth, and her eyes when he looked up at her. They were brown, and all of a sudden he wanted to weep – for so long her eyes had been frosted over or bleeding red like Lucifer’s when he’d seen her – somehow he had forgotten her eyes had the colour of fine cognac.

“Nick it’s okay,” she whispered, tears welling up in her eyes as she caught his gaze, body up against his. “It’s okay, you’re home again.”

“Sabrina,” he whispered, voice feeling raw in his throat.

He responded automatically, as though all his struggles to resist that sort of temptation had been for nothing, reaching up to brush his fingers over the round curve of her cheek.

“Is it that really you?”

“It is,” Sabrina whispered, tears starting to roll down her face as she looked down at him, hand flattening against his side, like a shot of heat against his freezing skin and still everything in his head screamed _liar, liar, liar._ “It is me.”

It couldn’t be. It was another trick and an old one at that. Lucifer had used it before. Nick kept getting stuck in Sabrina’s room over and over again, lured deep into her arms and her lips in mirages that blurred along the edges with nostalgia until everything in Nick clenched tight in his panic to keep Lucifer where he was, pressing back against the corrosive influence of the devil’s illusions.

And yet, it had never happened like it was now. Sabrina hadn’t cried before in those kinds of visions, just smiled to see him, opened her arms to bid him welcome. Now she did both, tears streaming down her face as she tried to smile for him, the expression wobbly around the edges.

“Why are you crying?” he asked, reaching up to brush the tears away, trying to see if it would break the illusion, but it didn’t.

No answer came, instead a tremulous look shivered across her face that had started to go blotchy as more tears came. His fingers came away wet – she felt real – and he didn’t care anymore. He was so tired, if it was a lie, at least he could live in it for a little while. It had been such a long time since Satan had tried to use a mirage as comforting as this one to break him.

Sabrina’s mouth was warm and full of give as he surged up to kiss her, her hair silky against the hand he wrapped around her neck to keep her close. Her fingers circling around his arm to hold onto him.

The kiss didn’t last long though, Sabrina’s lips breaking from his with a breathy little noise that spilled into a sob when Nick pressed his forehead against hers.

The sobs became worse, heaving, panicky noises that made Nick’s mouth taste sour with fear. He’d heard that sound before too, over and over, and the cold sweat sprang up on the back of his neck, but then Sabrina moved, hand stroking warm and soothing along his side.

“I’m sorry,” Sabrina gasped out in between sobs. “I’m so happy you’re back. I thought I’d never get to touch you again.”

He buried his face in her neck in lieu of answer, cold sweat heated by the puff of Sabrina’s breath against his shoulder as she kept crying.

The delicate rosy scent of her shampoo clung to her hair, mixing with the peppery incense she preferred to use for her rituals, but the smell of sulphur was there too. So faint it was like an echo, and Nick could feel himself deflate with disappointment. An illusion then. No amount of magic or manipulation could take away that stench.

And yet, another smell came as his grip tightened on her and he burrowed deeper into her arms. Underneath the roses and spices and fiery stink of hell he could pick up the faint musk of her sweat, not a scent he remembered ever smelling in Lucifer’s carefully constructed dreams of her when they’d had their first battles within Nick’s head.

Nick tensed.

“Oh no,” Sabrina whispered, voice sounding water-logged and horrified all at once, and Nick tensed further still when she wriggled in the circle of his arms, but the next words that came out of her mouth were not what he imagined. “I cried all over you.” 

He began to shake, belly muscles jumping, not quite understanding what was he was doing, until Sabrina let out a protesting sniffle and gave his shoulder a half hearted push. 

“Stop laughing,” she insisted, but Nick clamped down his hands on her arms, refusing to let her leave, suddenly full of the awareness that he wasn’t dreaming.

Satan would never be able to imagine the relief in the ridiculousness of Sabrina freaking out because she’d cried too hard all over him.

She was real, mucous, tears and all, and Nick laughed, no noise coming out, until his entire body ached with it, startled that he still even remembered how to do so.

“Lucifer would never have you crying snot on me,” he rasped as he managed to get them into a position where he could see her face again. “You’re real.”

“At least let me blow my nose before you start to sweet talk me,” she grumbled, and Nick’s chest constricted at the tight cadence of her voice.

He recognized the look of embarrassment on her features and he wanted to kiss her again, but Sabrina had managed to wriggle to the edge of the bed, grabbing the Kleenex on her nightstand and rolled away from him to blow her nose and dry her face, back turned against him. She was cringing when she turned around and patted at his shoulder with a fresh wad of tissues.

“You’re perfect.” Nick whispered, tugging her back towards him when she tried to leave the bed, and finally Sabrina looked him in the eye again, grimacing.

“I’m a mess,” Sabrina countered, sniffling, but Nick shook his head, refusing to let go of her.

“A perfect, terrible mess, Sabrina Spellman.”

She was so beautiful in all her ragged, blotchy glory that it hurt to look at her and Nick pushed forward again, wildly pressing his mouth to hers. For a moment she went rigid, but then surrendered all at once, body lax against his, fingers running through his rumbled hair.

This time Sabrina’s lips parted underneath his, and he could taste the sweetness of the little sigh that left her when his tongue traced across her upper lip.

She seemed to kiss him back with everything she had, hands traversing his chest and stomach, mouth hungry and warm under his. Blooms of heat erupted under his skin where she touched him, gooseflesh spreading across his shoulders in time with the scritch of her nails. 

So unlike Lilith’s cold hands. Though her touch had been gentle as well. Right until it wasn’t, and she’d had his tongue, dripping with Lucifer’s venom, torn right out of his mouth with burning tongs.

It had been a short reprieve for Nick’s mind – all of Lucifer’s was rage turned outward, the insult to his throne and legacy obvious in the way that Lilith made Nick stagger around in nothing but a ruff, a plaything for her court to laugh and grab at.

Sabrina was careful, feeling him out rather than grabbing at him, open palmed touches tracing over the spread of his chest, the dip of his hip, every inch of exposed skin she could reach.

Pleasure felt disorienting as he lay upon the bed, body forced to reboot in fits and starts as Sabrina moaned into his mouth, tongue rolling against his. The memory of how physical enjoyment had felt like before was distant and hazy, like some half forgotten dream.

When he kissed her neck, he could taste copper of the blood pounding under her skin, and he shivered, feeling as though his mouth was filling with it and the memories howled behind the door he was desperately trying and failing to keep closed in his mind.

_Betrayer._

_You let my father kill me._

Prudence hadn’t been sacrificed. Sabrina had saved her, but while the taste of blood spread in his mouth, the memories that Lucifer had spliced and twisted welled up all over again. 

He could see Prudence, body broken open, Nick himself scooping out her insides and swallowing them down, the coven cheering him until the thick blood and the chunks of flesh rebelled in his stomach. This time he didn’t manage to keep it down, but vomited in the middle of the desecrated church.

It kept coming and coming until he was spitting out his own teeth and bits of tongue too, body disintegrating from the inside.

Prudence had stroked his hair then, body gaping open, a grotesque parody of what he had once wanted from her so badly.

“This is what happens when you put Sabrina before all other, before the coven, before me, my sisters,” she whispered, blood bubbling from her lips, and Nick could hear Agatha and Dorcas weeping behind him. “Morningstar, not Spellman, she’ll tear you apart, Nicky.” 

“I’ve missed you,” Sabrina whispered, the words sounding like a benediction, and Nick broke through the haze of bloody recollection as if emerging from deep water, gasping for air. 

“I’ve missed you so much, every day, all the time,” she said, and the hollow, cried out breaths from before had changed into sharp, breathy pants.

The feel of her body under his hands was like an anchor, sensations grounding him – the rub of her clothes against his bare skin, hands pressed so close to him it was like he could feel the whorls of her fingerprints.

When Nick frantically began tugging her turtleneck free of the skirt, Sabrina arched her back, body contorting until he could reach under it and smooth his hands over her soft skin. 

He knew this script, what he was supposed to say. To do.

“I can’t believe this is really happening,” Nick confessed, hand travelling round to her front, splaying across her belly and relishing the jump of her muscles under his touch.

Recalling a ticklish spot on her hip, Nick’s fingers chased for it, and smiled into the curve of her neck when she squirmed, relieved his memory had been true. 

“Believe it,” she said, half giggling, half sighing, peppering kisses across his face – his nose, his cheek, the jut of his browbone, breathing just as hard as he was – “You’re here, in my room, with me. It’s all real.”

As her mouth found its way back to his, she moved closer still, wrapping a leg around him. Nick shivered, realizing how loose her hips had gone, how eager she was to spread herself wide underneath him, and he let the heel rubbing against the back of his calf draw him deeper in between her thighs. 

Sabrina wasn’t stopping like she usually would have before – pulling back with a shaky giggle as she squeezed her thighs together and Nick would have to press his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth until he no longer felt as though he was going to bust apart at the seams. Instead, she seemed as desperate to feel his flesh as he was for feeling hers.

When he reached up to run his hand across her breasts, he mostly got a handful of the tight spandex of her training bra, but Sabrina seemed to feel it, nails digging into his shoulder as she whimpered.

The pain was another rush to his head, and Nick fisted the elasticated fabric until it strained, and Sabrina’s breath left her lungs in a sharp, little gasp as the force made it dig into her shoulder.

_Why, the little bitch does have a submissive streak after all._

His thoughts didn't feel like his own, sounding like Lucifer instead. Like he was still there, hissing filth and horror in his ear, and Nick let go of the sports bra as if burned. An awful, disturbing lust that wasn't his alone welled up within him like pus bursting from a wound, and he made a desperate grab for Sabrina’s hand, stopping her from exploring further, her hands dangerously close to the edge of his sweatpants.

Immediately her fingers went limp in his grip, and she froze.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, eyes wide. “It’s too much, isn’t it? I just wanted to…”

“It’s not…” he said, interrupting her embarrassed rambling, but had to swallow before he could continue, forcing a smile. “I’m just… I’m so tired Sabrina, I don’t want to struggle to keep up. Not for this.”

He could see the words fail to find a home from how hard she was flushing, how her gaze skittered across his face, and all at once, Nick wanted to cry. This wasn’t what a reunion was supposed to look like. Sabrina shamefaced for wanting him, and Nick struggling to keep the panic and the monstrous desire at bay.

“I just want to show you how much I care…”

“I know you do,” he muttered, forcing himself to kiss her again, something gentle, only surface deep, inhaling her warm breath before he pulled back, pressing his forehead against her chest, words half muffled when he spoke again. “You came for me.”

“And I’d do it a million times more,” Sabrina vowed, hands trembling when she ran them through his hair, brushing across his ears and making him shiver.

He lost track of time, all sense of it slipping away as the awful, terrible lust began to subside while Sabrina kept stroking his hair and his shoulder, carefully cupping the back of his neck to keep him with her, his cheek resting against her breast. Almost chaste if not for the way her thighs still bracketed his waist.

It was an in-between moment. Moments like it had served as what little refuge he had managed to piece together in hell, gaps for him to slip through when Lilith had forced him to look at his preserved tongue or Lucifer had been dredging through the deepest recesses of his mind.

Lucifer had no interest in Nick’s tender memories of Sabrina. His pursuit of Nick’s most red-blooded thoughts of her had begun almost at once, no matter how hard he’d tried to cram them into a part of his mind where Lucifer couldn’t reach them.

An arrogant, vain struggle. No place was safe from Lucifer once Nick had taken the decision to lock him within. Nick realized that soon enough. Especially not the excited lip biting expression on Sabrina’s face when he pulled her robe open or the choked off whimper she let out when she ground herself to a sudden, startled orgasm on top of him. 

_Likes to be on top, doesn’t she?_ Lucifer would whisper, soft as a lover, the deep notes full of malice as he forced Nick to relive that night over and over again. _It will be glorious to put her in her place. Make her beg for it._

The constant stream of vile commentary was ceaseless, perverting every intimate experience he had with Sabrina.

But what came after was worse.

Realising that his words would not do what he wanted them to – no matter how volatile Nick’s reactions were – Lucifer had changed tactics.

He’d already torn Nick’s defenses down like it was nothing despite how long Nick had trained to shield his thoughts in his altercations with the sisters – breaking his memories apart like a child pulling the legs off a spider seemed barely like any effort at all.

The Sabrina Nick remembered changed. No longer bright eyed and giddy astride his hips, but weeping and struggling underneath him as he pushed her thighs apart with no regards to her protests.

There was no humiliation or depravity that Lucifer couldn’t imagine visiting on his daughter, his rage burning constantly like a furnace in Nick’s mind. A fever that nothing could break.

Sometimes his hands were Lucifer’s, clawed and brutal, and then she wasn’t unwilling at all, but grateful and eager for her father’s touch. Her moans obscene and loud and as impossible to shut out as a baby’s wails, even when the hands became his own as he wrapped them around her delicate, little throat and began to squeeze the life from her, her eyes turning a ghostly white to match her hair.

He saw her as Lucifer wanted her to be, wreathed in flame, relishing in her bloodlust, grinding Nick and everyone else down under the heel of her boot. A Sabrina who no longer stabbed Amalia, but tore her apart and placed her severed head in Nick’s hands. No longer cutting the throat of just Agatha, but Prudence too, and Dorcas. With no intention to resurrect either of them, leaving their bodies to rot.

Forced to understand that there was no ground in his mind that Lucifer couldn’t take should he want it, Nick learned to cling to the simplest things. The barest flickers of memories that the Dark Lord could not see the point of, too preoccupied stitching Nick’s thoughts into the most brutal tapestries possible.

The puzzled scrunch of Sabrina’s nose when she tried to figure out if she liked the taste of gin, the feel of her hand in the darkness of the movie theatre.

Living through the nightmare of digging up his parents’ rotting corpses, Nick tried to hold onto the memory of his mother’s sweet voice, humming a few stanzas of a lullaby, the smell of his father’s cigars.

Of course, the cruelest torture of all was on the rare occasion when the Dark Lord would lure him into one good dream alongside the horror. Let Nick remember, for a brief, painful moment what he used to have and what he could have again if he loosened the bindings, just a little – sniggering with Prudence as they turned the staircases to the dorm of the upper slick with ice, his parents watching him and Amalia wrestle on the lawn in front of their house.

Dancing at Dorian’s, Sabrina squirming and giggling in his arms when he leaned down to whisper in her ear.

Until the nostalgia blurred daydreams fell apart into something worse than what had come before.

“Nick,” Sabrina whispered, hand stroking down along his spine in a sweeping caress that made him focus on her voice with a protesting grunt. “You’re shaking.”

He was, like a cornered animal, but when he opened his eyes, he was still in Sabrina’s bedroom, the smell of Sabrina’s perfume and incense in the air.

Her eyes were still brown and affectionate, although there was the barest kink to her brows, as though she was trying not to look concerned.

“I guess I’m cold,” he lied while he eased off of her, settling his body against the mattress instead.

Sabrina didn’t leave though, reaching down to tug the blanket up over him, fingers trailing along his chest. Her eyes were shaded in the dim light of the room, and he remembered a thought from before, something that felt important – the words found their way to his tongue before they were barely formed in his mind.

“You smell like sulphur,” he muttered, intertwining his fingers with hers, holding on.

For the briefest moment there was something lost about her, doubtful, not the most common expression on her face when she was always so sure of everything.

“I know, it really doesn’t wash out, does it?” she scoffed, tugging at her silver hair with a grimace.

“There was a price for bringing me up top, wasn’t there?” he muttered, heart starting to pick up speed again.

“None that I couldn’t pay.”

He opened his mouth for another question, but Sabrina shook her head, pressing her fingers against his lips for a moment to stall his words.

“We can talk about all that stuff tomorrow, let me bask for tonight,” she whispered, and leaned down to give him a soft flutter of a kiss.

He couldn’t deny her, not with her warm lips backing up the argument, her hand cradling his jaw as she persuaded his mouth to open with her tongue. The fervour from before had gone, replaced by a molten intensity that made Nick sigh and pull her closer until she felt like his girl again, tiny and safe within the circle of his arms.

“Basking?” he muttered when Sabrina pulled back and he realized she was waiting for answer.

“Uh-huh.”

“I can do basking.” 

“Good,” she said, face so close to his he couldn’t properly see her smile, only the glitter of it in her eyes, her fingers tracing across the curve of his brow. 

Nick let her, ignoring the warning that the hammer of his heart was beating out, and closed his eyes, let her touch ghost across his lids.

The rest could wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What did you think about me intermingling Nick's reunion with Sabrina with his experiences in hell? I considered making it all hell, but couldn't seem to get a proper handle on that without making it too graphic and upsetting, and I most of all wanted to portray how disjointed Nick feels. 
> 
> This also marks the last chapter with Sabrina making a proper appearance. Next week Nick and Prudence commiserate over their respective misfortunes. 
> 
> And that will be the final chapter guys, what a ride it's been.


	17. Kindred

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just in time for part 4, here we are. Final chapter, picking up where we last saw Nick and Prudence. Let’s follow them into the academy and see what happens.

Nick was shivering when he woke up, sprawled on top of his bedding as if he’d simply collapsed onto it, arms bare in the cool air that crept in through the half open windows.

He did not remember falling asleep, and as he frowned into the darkness of the room, he could only vaguely remember climbing onto the bed at all.

All the images and sensations from what had come seemed coated over by a thick film of exhaustion. Slumping onto the stone steps of the academy, too weary to revel in the blood and mayhem of the coven’s triumph. Prudence, sharp and then contrite she’d joined him, hair soft against his cheek.

A blurry, half formed memory of Prudence’s silhouette bracketed by the light spilling into his room from the hallway. He wasn’t sure if he had been the one to pull her up from the steps or if it had been the other way around.

When he rolled onto his side in the bed, she was still there, although it took a moment before he recognised the shape of her in the dark. He had never seen her curled in on herself like that before. So tight that she barely took up any space at all.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room – sparse moonlight filtered through the gaps in the curtains was the lone source of light – he caught sight of her expression, not quite relaxed even as she slept. There was a crease between her brows as if her mind was still working overtime.

The intimacy of the situation caught up to him all at once. He couldn’t recall any time he and Prudence had shared a bed for anything other than sex and its immediate aftermath. The only person he had ever seen in such a trusting state was Sabrina, and with the low lighting in the room it was all too easy to close his eyes and recall the image of a sleeping Sabrina – flushed and relaxed, mouth lolling open a little as she breathed. Whether he wanted to or not.

Nick sat up in a lurch, rubbing the grit from his eyes until he saw stars and he could hear Prudence shifting next to him. The energy had changed in the room, she was awake, though not speaking, and Nick couldn’t look at her, feeling too scooped out for eye contact.

“Did the drinking help with the dreams?” She asked after a time, voice devoid of the softness she had spoken with earlier in the evening when she had settled onto the steps outside of the Academy next to him.

“It was more about making it bearable being awake,” Nick admitted after a while, blinking to clear his vision of the spots the vigorous rubbing had created.

“You want a drink now,” she deduced, and he sensed her sitting up as well, moving closer to him.

“I’m pretty sure that it won’t work after the number Ambrose did on me, but yeah…” he conceded and he could hear himself sound just as dispassionate as she did. “I do.”

He got Prudence’s mouth instead.

The shock of the contact was enough to make him flinch away from her, but Prudence had never been easily dissuaded from doing anything. When she advanced again, Nick sunk into it with a harsh sigh, lips parting for her tongue and he reached out to trace his fingers across the shell of her ear and the hinge of her jaw until she shivered with it.

She didn’t speak when she pulled back, but waited. He half got the sense of something coiled in the dark, lying in wait.

He wasn’t sure if she was the one pushing him down or if he dragged her down when he collapsed back onto the bed. Whoever it was, it ended up the same way. Prudence astride his hips, mouth hungry against his.

Despite how long it had been since the last they’d had sex last; he still knew the landscape of her body almost as well as he did his own. That she would moan when his fingers dug into the curve of her ass, and that all it took to make her entire body quake was to yank open her blouse and bite down on the curve of her breast.

And yet as familiar her body felt to the touch, it was disorienting too.

Prudence didn’t gasp when he traced his thumb across the dip of her hip, nor did she look like she wanted to cry when she pulled back to stare down at him. Not like Sabrina had looked at him the last time they’d been sitting on this bed. When he’d told her that he wasn’t going to kiss her and pulled free of her arms.

When he left her.

He relished the ache when Prudence gripped onto his shoulder and the heel of her hand dug into one of the bruises still left from carnival battle.

“Harder,” he muttered when she leaned down to kiss him again, and he caught a flutter of Prudence’s lashes before she obeyed and pressed down harder until Nick spat out a curse, body rolling into the pain.

His head felt clearer, his memories sharper and he remembered the bite of Salo’s lash, the frightening strength of De Sade’s fingers around his throat… the humiliation of Sabrina seeing him strung out and trussed up. The whip cracking against his back even as he tried to apologise and free himself from the restraints.

“You don’t actually want to do this, do you?”

He startled, not realising that he had been trailing off, hand limp on Prudence’s thigh.

When he failed to answer, and instead tried to reach up for her again, she bore down on the bruise until he went still underneath her with a snarl of pain. Though this time it didn’t feel arousing, but more like glass splinters, obtrusive and impossible to move with.

He used to be so good at keeping things inside, but pinned beneath Prudence’s hands and her gaze, he felt more like an open wound, pain and pus leaking out of him despite all his attempts to plug it up.

"No?" She prompted again.

He stared up at her for a few moments, not quite able to see her expression in detail, her face full of shadows, but the warning in her body language was palpable.

“No,” Nick finally agreed, the word feeling huge, almost too massive to work off of his tongue.

Prudence rolled off of him, sighing when she settled back against the pillows and the crispness of the heavily embroidered bedspread.

“Sorry,” he sighed after a while, reaching down to adjust himself and heaved a deep breath as his arousal faded and left behind his new constant companion. The dull ache deep in his chest.

“Whatever,” Prudence hissed, and out of the corner of his eyes he could see her retying her blouse. “I know better than to rely on men for anything. You’ve all been a disappointment.”

“I’m sorry on behalf of my gender too,” Nick muttered, mustering up the palest pretence of sarcasm, about as much heat in it as there was in Prudence’s insult.

Even so it felt familiar, more familiar than almost anything else had done for a long, long while. It was the oldest dance in his repertoire, with the most familiar partner he had.

“I should go,” she said after a while, but didn’t move to get up.

Nick let her be, his own thoughts numbed over, drifting from one place to the other before anything could settle until Prudence spoke again, and made him come back to himself in a lurch.

“She looked so small, like a child… Like a little doll…” Prudence said, voice coming out smaller and smaller… “All that pretty hair.”

Nick blinked, turning his head towards her, but Prudence’s hand covered his eyes, pushing his face away.

“Stop looking at me,” she snapped, voice cracking, and he realised she was crying.

He didn’t touch her or turn his head, but shuffled a little closer until he could feel the warmth of her body against his skin. He had spent so long crushed under the weight of his own pain, helping someone trying to shoulder theirs felt almost like a relief.

As he pretended not to be aware of her silent weeping, he remembered her again as a child, crying in the same soundless way after being struck across the hand with Blackwood’s cane.

Dorcas was the only one of the four of them who had never managed to learn how to cry without making any noise, never quite as good as hiding her emotions, the clear blue of her eyes always telegraphing everything loud and clear.

“Remember when Agatha cut off one Dorcas’ pigtails?” he asked, the memory bubbling to the surface as Prudence stopped trembling, and a startled, waterlogged snort came out of her mouth. “She tried to make it like a look for a week, didn’t she?”

“Three days,” Prudence corrected him, her voice raw from the tears. “She looked so fucking stupid.”

“Wasn’t her first dumb idea,” Nick muttered, and all of a sudden, his numbness ground to a halt, remembering the look of frustrated longing on Dorcas’ face when she used to look at him, and there was a pang of an old, sharp pain in his gut.

“No, she was full of them,” Prudence agreed. “It was a fucking full-time job to reign her in.”

“She was a grown woman. That wasn’t your job,” Nick muttered, hearing the rawness in his own voice and winced.

“Who’s if not mine? She was my sister, there wasn’t anyone else,” she spat, suddenly angry.

All trace of tears was gone from her voice, and he could feel her grief like an actual physical thing. Something corrosive, dark and awful trying to force its way from her lungs and into his.

“I thought I learned my lesson the last time my father tried to kill them, and then I let him do it all over again.”

“You didn’t let him do anything, Pru,” Nick said, trying to reassure the agitation that he could feel was on the way to spiral out of control. “He took advantage of situation. Just like he always did.”

“You weren’t the one with your blade against his throat,” she hissed, and next to him he could feel her hand clenching as though her fingers were itching to grip one of her blades once again. “You weren’t the one who could have stopped him from ever doling out pain again."

“So why didn’t you?”

“Sentiment,” she said, spitting the word out as though it was the vilest of curses, her dark silence seeming almost like a declaration of war on the world.

“Pan and the pagans would still have come even if you had killed him” Nick reminded her as gently as he could, trying not to disturb all of her barbed edges. “And I would still have been Lucifer’s flesh suit if you hadn’t brought him back.”

“And how did that work out for you?”

“Thanks,” he grunted, the barbed remark smarting more than he expected it would, his nerves feeling raw and exposed now that the numbness had faded. Anger and frustration mixing in with the grief sitting alongside his bones.

He made a move to put some distance between them, but Prudence’s hand unclenched and settled over his for a second, a wordless plea for him to stick around.

“Fucking Spellmans,” she said with an aggravated sigh. “They ruined us.”

Finally putting two and two together – and feeling dumb for not having done so sooner – Nick realised where her unexpected tactility on the steps of the academy had come from, understood her impulsive desire to fuck him.

She had broken off her liaison with Ambrose.

It wasn’t just her grief over Agatha and Dorcas that made her emotions spike in all directions.

And now she was as alone as he was. No sisters, no Ambrose. Cut loose. He wanted to reach out and take her hand again.

“You regret it then? Loving him?” Nick asked instead, and felt her tense next to him.

“Don’t be absurd,” Prudence hissed. “I’m not some freak like you who goes around falling in love like you let yourself do with Sabrina.”

Nick tensed up automatically, as though guarding a bruise. In Prudence’s mouth, Sabrina’s name felt like a battering ram, and his gaze slipped to the foot of the bed once again.

He knew it had been the right choice to push Sabrina away, and not let her tears and the warm hand at the back of his neck persuade him to stay in the clutch of her love.

No matter how much he still wanted her, how much she wanted him to stay, it wasn’t going to do either of them any good. The urge to run to the mortuary and curl up in her lap, and let her try to fill up all the voids within him with her boundless capacity for love.

“I don’t think I regret it,” he said, the words feeling almost like relief as they burst from his mouth while he tried to blink away the burn of tears in his eyes. “Loving her that is.”

“That’s a deranged attitude if I’ve ever heard one,” Prudence scoffed.

He resisted the urge to tell her that falling for Ambrose Spellman clearly wasn’t something she should regret. He hadn’t ruined her. Quite the opposite in fact.

Even if Nick had spent most of his time since getting back from hell delirious on drink, drugs and wild, blind panic, he had picked up on the change in her.

It had been impossible not to. The blue flame of her intensity had goldened along the edges. Her time with Ambrose had given new nuances to her usual fierceness and confidence. Qualities that had only made her more striking.

Once, loving Sabrina had made him feel like a greater person too, but faced with what it had cost him – and how little it had ended up mattering in the end – most of the time it felt like love had debased him.

But perhaps it hadn’t. At least as he considered Prudence now, the gravity she had picked up along the way hadn’t faded even though she had left Ambrose. Despite the misery that radiated from her like heat rising off of a festering wound.

There had been moments after the crucible of his detox where he had felt as if he could sense some part of the man he had been before. In a way he hadn’t been able to while Lucifer’s infection had still been eating away at him. He’d sensed flickers of his old self when he’d admonished Sabrina for failing her family and when he’d come to the rescue of the mortals.

Maybe the clarity he had felt as he’d thrust himself in front of Sabrina and decided to sacrifice himself in her stead hadn’t been lost to him either.

That he could still find some variation of the man he had shown himself to have the capacity to be. The kind of fight that there was in him when he was at the end of the line.

“Pru?”

“Yeah?”

She sounded like she was miles away, and he was pretty sure it was that more than anything that gave him the courage to ask the question that Sabrina hadn’t been willing to consider with him.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

“Didn’t I just tell you that you were deranged?” She huffed, sounding present, but there was no heat behind the insult this time, nothing to cause him pain.

“I mean despite all Lucifer, despite hell. I mean something seriously wrong me,” he tried to clarify, but that made the question sound even more imprecise.

“Nicholas,” she started, sighing, and the novelty of her using his full name almost made him look at her again.

He stopped himself in time - their lack of eye contact seemed the only thing that kept the conversation going between them.

“Remember when everyone used to say I was a gutter orphan and everyone called you freak boy?”

“You called me freak boy,” Nick reminded her.

“And you called me gutter orphan,” Prudence fired back, and Nick grimaced, remembering the one time he’d been vile enough to do so. The look on her face when he did.

“We showed them, didn’t we? Any reason you want to give Lucifer the satisfaction of being right about you?”

“I’m not sure I have a choice anymore.”

"Now you’re fishing for pity," Prudence muttered into the dark, sounding more like the most ancient of witches instead of the girl she actually was. "We're not cut out for that."

When she completed the mantra – no good ever comes of it – Nick echoed her, as if by reflex, but despite not looking at her, the conversation sputtered and ground to a halt, a heavy silence settling over the two of them once more.

Nick could hear the ticking off the clock somewhere off to the side, the distant hooting of an owl outside, and then the shift of Prudence’s body against the crisp bedspread.

She sat up, rolling her heard from side to side as to loosen herself up against after sleeping in such a curled-up position. All of a sudden it seemed as though time was running out – that if she got up from the bed now, she would slip through his fingers, never to be seen again.

“And if I’m not asking for pity,” he asked, heart in his throat, and Prudence went still, her weight settling back onto the bed as if he had filled more sand into the hourglass, but she didn’t turn around.

“Then what are you asking for?”

It felt as though he was going to be sick, the embarrassment clenching everything tight in his body, from guts to throat, but somehow, he managed to open his mouth.

“A friend?” he said, hearing the doubt in his own voice, the watery upturn on the final word.

Prudence let out a short, startled chuckle, and when she fell silent, the quiet settled heavier than ever. Nick went back to count the seconds passing by, the ticking sounding almost impossibly loud, even over the panicked pounding of his own pulse.

She was going to disappear. He knew it, like he’d lost Sabrina and Agatha and Dorcas and Amalia – his parents. Get up from the bed and leave him in Greendale to fester in his own misery, the mess he’d made of everything.

Forty-one seconds passed by before Prudence turned around.

Nick could see the wet sheen of her eyes in the dark, the curve of her cheek catching a bit of the moonlight that filtered through the curtains, and all the panicked tension drained from him.

"What do you need, Nicky?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that’s all she wrote guys. What a ride it’s been. I always knew that this was going to be where the story ended up, because the image of Nick finding the courage to ask Prudence for help was what kicked this whole thing off originally. 
> 
> Sure took some detours along the way though. 
> 
> I appreciate each and every one of you who stopped by to read, you are the best, and I’m so happy you found something to love in these mostly angsty chapters, though I hope I gave you enough bantering and sexiness to not make it too miserable. 
> 
> Special thanks really need to go to Bunivys and Willowaus for being the most amazing cheerleaders for this story since the very beginning. Both here and elsewhere. It’s been a long time since I finished a story this lengthy, and your encouragement helped getting me there. 
> 
> I hope to have something new for you in January, possibly a oneshot or two before that. 
> 
> And as always, you are more than welcome to come and say hi to me on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unseemingowl) :)


End file.
